Finding Great Keywords For Search Engine Optimization
Keyword research, in my opinion, is the most important thing to do when implementing an SEO strategy. Finding the right search engine optimization keywords you want to go after is crucial. When researching for keywords, you want to keep 3 different things in mind. Those would be relevance, competition/volume, and strategy. Nowadays, with more and more websites popping up and content creation becoming a huge industry, SEO is getting harder and harder. Keywords are more competitive. Cost Per Clicks are at an all time high. Everyone wants to be on the first page of Google. For obvious reasons.
Even though competition is tough out there, you still need to have your website as optimized as you can. I mean, you obviously can’t compete with Forbes that has been putting out new content for years and years. Google’s crawlers have probably crawled that site so many times I can only imagine. Putting out great content that is relevant to your business or whatever your site is about, is huge. And that’s why it is our first point.
Relevance
Let’s start a hypothetical business. We have a woodworking shop. We make custom furniture, high end moldings, mounts, any custom orders that we get etc. We have a good looking website with all of the basics. Home page, About us, Contact, Gallery, and Blog. Eventually we might add on and make it an e-commerce site so we can sell some of the things that we make all of the time. We want to build our website presence so we want to do SEO. We are in the keyword research phase.
So looking for keywords for this business we want to come up with a list of all keywords that are relevant to our business. For example
- woodworking
- custom woodworking
- woodworking shop
- custom furniture
- local woodworker
- wood carpentry
- woodworking plans
- woodworking tools
and so on.
It can be quite repetitive but it’s worth it. After you come up with a list, you can use a keyword tool online to search for that keyword or phrase to see how much the search volume is, difficulty, paid difficulty and CPC. In a perfect world, you want high search volume, a low difficulty, and a low CPC. It depends on how niche your keywords are. My favorite keyword analyzer is Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest. It’s free to sign up and it gives you a ton of information. Pay for it and you can get even more information. A lot of the really good ones you have to pay for, but this one is just fine for what we need it for. Ubersuggest also gives you domain information with is really cool, but I’ll let you look into that.
Competition/Volume
Next is competition and volume. Search volume is the amount of times that keyword is searched for in Google. Just to be clear, when I say that keyword I mean just that word or phrase. Let’s use “woodworking.” I don’t mean when someone types into Google like “What woodworking project should I start?” that doesn’t count in the search volume for that keyword. The search volume for “woodworking” currently is at around 74,000 searches. That means there were 74,000 times someone typed in “woodworking” into Google and clicked search. I’m actually surprised it was that high. On the other hand, the difficulty is at an 82 which is pretty high. So there’s a lot of sites that are targeting that keyword. Might want to hone in on a specific word or phrase with lower competition. Not saying you can never target it, it will just take a while to build credibility and for Google to even bat and eye at you with that keyword you’re targeting. You’ll need credible content, authority, reputability, and frequent postings. This is why competition and volume are important.
Strategy
For obvious reasons, strategy is one thing you need to keep in mind when selecting keywords to target. What is your marketing plan? Who’s your customer base? What do you think will boost sales/drive more traffic? After you come up with your list, and plug them into an analyzer, this is where strategy comes in. You can have your own strategy for anything you take on so there’s really nothing for me to explain here.
Summary
In closing, here is the order in which you should select keywords for search engine optimization
- Make a list of relevant keywords for your website/business
- plug in all of those keywords into a keyword analyzer app/software
- view all information including search volume, competition, and CPC
- choose keywords based on your research and strategy
- Optimize your website and content accordingly
If you want to learn more about Search Engine Optimization, be sure to contact me!
