keyword research

Source: Maple Wood Web Design

Planning Content For SEO

Many of you have likely heard the phrase “Content is king.” Publishing content is a search engine optimization technique used to rank for keywords and keyword phrases. For those of you that don’t understand search engine optimization, this is a process of techniques that are used to increase your visibility online. Content plays a vital role in the online world, every website uses some type of content planning for SEO. Most plan their content knowingly, others may not. If you don’t plan your content out or you haven’t begun publishing content yet, take this information to heart. Before you publish your next article, post, or page, you need to make sure you choose the right keywords.

So, how can you choose the right keywords? In this article, we’re going to explore how you can research the right keywords for your website, blog or business. So before you start your content, you need to take the time to start building your keyword list to plan your content around. Let’s start determining which keywords that you need to target and why.

Choosing The Correct Keywords For Your Business

While it’s never too late to start using the correct keywords, those of you that have a lot of published post and pages will need to re-evaluate your keyword panel. If your keywords are working for you, the changes may be easy for some. If your not seeing traffic and sales, obviously the keywords you have chose are not working and need to be evaluated. Choosing the correct keywords for your business is vital to your success online. This is an area where inexperienced SEOs and webmasters fail.

There’s a number of different ways to figure out which keywords work best for your business. Easier said then done though. You could be at a stage where your more advanced then others, perhaps others are just starting out, I’ll touch on as much as I see appropriately. Your keywords are going to be based on your business, your services or your products. For our example, we’ll take a look at the keyword “Social Media Marketing.” There’s thousands of companies that offer social media marketing. If a company is offering it as a service, then it would be a good keyword to target, right? Let’s analyze it.

Now, if you look at the screenshot above, you’ll see that we researched the keyword social media marketing to see how many monthly searches the keyword gets. This is only one element of the keyword. We see that the competition level for the keyword is 84 percent, which represents that it’s a high competition keyword. Social media marketing gets 18,000 searches in the United States and over 60,000 globally. We also see that this keyword has an ad cost of around $14.02 per click.

When your researching keywords for your business or project, you need to be extremely careful choosing the keywords you want to target. This is where many SEOs, webmasters and business professionals make mistakes. We already know the results from the keyword, social media marketing. It has everything you look for, right? High traffic, locally and globally. The bid is high, we’d much rather rank this keyword organically. The competition is high, but we’ve ranked high competition keywords before.

Although this keyword has everything you want, social media marketing may not be a good keyword to target. Now, there’s some factors in this decision. An authority aged domain would have an easier time ranking for this keyword then a start-up or website that has less authority. This matters, if my website is an 60-80 percent authority rating, I could target the keyword with success, but it still is a broad keyword. Social media marketing is used for a variety of different purposes, which makes is that much harder to rank for.

Rather then using a broad keyword like social media marketing, I’m willing to research more keywords and try to find keywords that would better describe the services or products that I offer.

Keyword Results And Suggestions For Social Media Marketing

When researching your keywords, most popular keywords have a diamond in the rough and the same can be said for social media marketing. When we did our keyword search, we found the keyword marketing by social media. This keyword has nearly double the amount of searches, has a lower ad bid and only 29 percent competition. If this keyword reflects what your business does, which it does in our example, we’d rather target this keyword over social media marketing.

Targeting The Right Keyword And Audience

Every SEO campaign or project is different, it doesn’t matter if you have two cases that are in the same niche and field. Circumstances are always different. One thing that will never change is the importance of targeting the right keyword and audience. The right keyword will bring the right audience, only when your keyword choice is correct. Confusing? Perhaps a little, so let me explain.

At Hale Web Development, most of our clients are start-ups. The other portion are commonly those who have seen failure with their SEO attempts. We do our audit, evaluate their website and we determine a plan based on their needs. We are often asked to rank their keywords. When I research their keywords, I find that all of them have extensive search volumes. I get the thinking behind it, but this is the wrong manner to choose your keywords.

Keywords That Bring Conversions

Again, it all depends on your project, but you should never go down the line choosing high volume keywords only. You have to keep conversion in mind when choosing your keywords. Just because it is a keyword that has high volume doesn’t mean that the keyword is right for you. Makes sense, right? You have to open up a whole new level of researching keywords and that is keeping conversions in mind.

Once you get your keywords together, make sure you evaluate them. Get signed up with Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. If you’re doing marketing, SEO, you need some SEO software as well. We use SEO Profiler. You have Moz, Raven Tools, there’s a variety of SEO software providers that can be used. Analytics and Webmaster Tools are great if you don’t have anything, but you’re going to need more.

Back to keywords and conversions, what are you offering? Likely a service or product, right? SEO is used for organic traffic, so which keywords should we target? It should be keywords that describe that product, that describe that service. Why? Because that’s how we get organic conversions.

Let me explain this better. For example, I have a store online and I sell shirts for men. The ultimate goal is to sell shirts. Since shirts are my product, it only makes sense to target keywords that users can search for to find my products. It doesn’t do me any good to target pants or women’s shirts, I sell men’s shirts. In simple terms, your products are your keywords. You either try to rank for it organically or you pay Google for ads.

Keyword Ranking Factors

Every website has different keyword ranking factors, so results are always going to vary. Important to keep in mind. If you have a new website, it can take a long time before you’ll see your keywords ranking. With all the changes with Google, domain age is an important website metric. New websites are at a disadvantage from the get go, but don’t let it discourage you. SEO is a process that takes time and effort. Once you gain trust from Google and authority websites, the keyword ranking process becomes quicker and more efficient.

Growing your page authority, domain authority, link index value, Moz trust rank, all of these website metrics are important. As you grow these metrics over time, you should see increases in your keyword rankings across the board. The more authority your website has, the quicker your keywords will rank. You’ll be able to rank new keywords quicker and you should see content being indexed quicker also.

Optimizing Your Keywords

Optimizing keywords is probably the most important SEO technique that you need to apply and watch out on your website. Sometimes it can be very difficult for website owners who are not familiar with the SEO process. Developing content and link building strategies that grow your audience, build your brand, and increase your SEO and revenue is crucial for your business. OutreachMama has the latest info and strategies on how to do this.”

Long-Tail Keywords

SEO, also known as search engine optimization, is a field that is ever changing and often out of our control as SEO experts. Competition is fierce for all competitive keywords and start-up websites are off to big disadvantages from day one. Nearly August 2014 and SEO is different then now then it was at the beginning of 2014. No matter what, Google controls your results, not your SEO. Important to remember. Key point? Abide by Google’s rules, it’s that simple. Don’t worry about short-term gains with unfavorable SEO techniques. Your rankings will pay for it later.

Now, to our topic of this article, long-tail keywords. We all should have some concept of a keyword and the importance of such words in search engine rankings. If you don’t, a keyword is a term that you try to rank for to benefit the goals of your website. Your goal could be traffic, email signups, to sell a product or service. What ever the need may be, you have to rank for keywords, keyword phrases, key terms or any other word used to describe keywords. With most websites, conversions are the goal and this can be accomplished by ranking high for your search queries. More traffic equals more opportunity to sell.

So, why should a website want to rank for long-tail keywords as we call them? There’s a number of different reasons that you want to begin ranking with long-tailed keywords. For one and possibly most important, long-tail keywords are targeted less. Most companies choose to bypass long-tail keywords in hope of ranking for higher traffic keywords. This is often a mistake and a costly one at that. Two word keywords can take months and years to rank for, these keywords should be part of your long-term SEO process.

Another important reason why you want to target long-tail keywords is to target a specific demographic to buy a product or service. Just because a keyword has less traffic doesn’t mean that it isn’t a good keyword to use. For example, we’ll use the keyword Samsung Galaxy S5 16GB Smartphone. This is considered to be a long-tail keyword, (5) words make up this one keyword. It would be easier to rank for this keyword compared to Samsung Galaxy Smartphone or Samsung Galaxy S5. This is only an example, remember that. This keyword is going to be highly competitive, but this is an example only. I can hear the other SEOs now! Point noted.

Now, what is another benefit of having long-tail keyword campaigns? We will once again look at the same long-tail keyword, Samsung Galaxy S5 16GB Smartphone. Although this is only one keyword, how many keyword are actually in this long-tail term? Now I have you thinking. I can name 5 different combinations off the top. BINGO! This is a great SEO technique to use. You get the benefit of 5 keywords with one long-tail term. Yes, the search bot can read it as one term or many. I’ve tested this before, I’m sure other SEOs have as well. When using long-tail keywords, we ranked for other keywords within our long-tail keyword. It works, it is an effective SEO technique to use.

Retail websites, ecommerce websites, webmasters, you want to use detailed keywords for your products, right? If you’re not, you need to switch your focus. I know many of you focus on high traffic keywords and rightfully so. However, you have to mix these long-tail keywords in with your keyword plan. You may have 50,000 monthly searches for Samsung Galaxy Smartphone but only 300 for Samsung Galaxy S5 16GB White Smartphone. Why be descriptive and detailed? Many shoppers are looking for specific products. If they search for Samsung Galaxy S5 16GB White Smartphone, that is what they want. In most cases, the long-tail keywords are easier to rank for. If I have a top keyword bringing in 30,000 of the 50,000 monthly searches, I’m not worried about it. If that BIG TRAFFIC keyword is only bringing in 1 visitor a month, I would rather target the long-tail term to increase my opportunity for sales. Affiliate marketers, this goes for you too.

Your website should be diverse in key terms anyway, a great mixture of short and long-tail keywords. Retail has once again been hit with a Google update. A lot of traffic has been lost. Did you hear about this? Go search for a few terms. When I did, all I saw were local rankings. I’ve seen it with a few clients of my own and traffic is down for all our retail clients. I haven’t read much about it or I would have shared a link, I apologize. A little off topic but something to be aware of.

You don’t want to abandon your keyword campaigns. Short-tail keywords are still priority. They bring in the most traffic and always will. However, there is a benefit for the long-tail terms. Learn how you can use all types of keywords to benefit your rankings, traffic and conversions. Thanks for taking the time to read my article. As always, it’s greatly appreciated. If you liked it, please take the time to share it to help others. You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Tag Archives: keyword research

How To Choose The Right Keywords For Your Business

Planning Content For SEO

Choosing The Correct Keywords For Your Business