Step one of the five step web strategy process is to define your target market or ideal customer and identify what the pain points are for these customers. By identifiying these needs, wants or issues you can determine what search terms they are using to most frequently. These are some Google tools to help with that process.

Google Webmaster Tools – this is a free service provided by Google to provide information to website owners about how Google views their website. You can see the top website search queries which produce traffic for your site, as well as the top keyword rankings which you have. You can also see how many back links each page on your site has, as well as which sites are linking to each page. Other features include uploading an XML sitemap, generating robots.txt files, removing URLs and finding broken URLs on your website. Google Webmaster has many tools in this toolbox so be sure to use all of them.

Google Analytics – this is a free analytics service provided by Google. Simply open an account and paste the tracking code on every page of your website and you’ll be able to see a wide range of information about your website visitors. For SEO purposes, you want to look at the ‘traffic by non-paid keywords’ report to see which keywords are producing traffic for your site. Setup conversion tracking and sort the list in descending order by keywords which are producing the highest number of conversions. Keep an eye on this report to find new keywords which are driving traffic and conversions which you weren’t aware of and then focus SEO efforts on them as well.

Google Trends – this is yet another free service by Google which shows the trends of particular keywords over time. You can compare the trends of multiple keywords against one another, with a specified country. As the process of ranking a website at the top of a search engine can take 12 months or more, you want to make sure that the trend of your target keyword is moving in an upwards direction.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool – The Google Adwords Keyword Tool provides keyword suggestions based on ‘descriptive words’ or ‘website content’. Although this tool is made to assist Google Adwords advertisers, you can use it to research SEO keywords as well, by selecting ‘Exact’ from the ‘Match Type’ drop down menu. The best thing about this tool is that you can see estimated traffic volumes for exact match phrases within any country where Google has a search engine. Google is the major player in the search engine game and they are giving you tools to better your search.

Google Adwords Traffic Estimator – this is a free tool provided by Google, which provides Adwords advertisers with an estimated cost of running a PPC campaign using specific keyword phrases. Use it like this: export the exact match keywords from the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, paste them into the Google Traffic Estimator, select the country you are optimising in, run the search and then sort the keywords in descending order by ‘estimated cost per day’. This is a great way of identifying the keywords which may have high traffic volumes but don’t convert very well, because those phrases which do not produce revenue for advertisers will have a low cost-per-click and an overall lower estimated cost per day as a result.