Tips for Choosing the Best Keywords Dallas, Fort Worth, TX

Tips for Choosing the
Best Keywords

Google Keyword Finder Tool

Target Niches
The best keywords are not necessarily the most popular.  Also important to success is the number of competing sites, and how targeted your keywords are to your products and services.

1. Niche keywords can produce a nice flow of traffic if you're careful to pick ones that still have some popularity.
   

2. Niche keywords can significantly increase your chance of success. Achieving a top rankings will be much easier with niche keyword phrases versus very broad, highly popular phrases.  No top ranking can be guaranteed in an organic search engine like Google. There are simply too many variables.  Therefore, you'll greatly increase your chances of success by choosing less competitive keyword phrases.
   

3. Niche keywords will save time. While you could use various tools and research to achieve top rankings for fiercely competitive terms, the time required to do so may not be worthwhile. Let your competitor waste their efforts on the ultra-competitive phrases.  In the same amount of time they spend trying to achieve a single top ranking for your industry's most popular phrase, you could achieve top rankings on twenty other phrases.
   

4. Niche keywords yield more sales per visitor. That's because these keywords are more targeted. Therefore, these prospects have a better idea of what they want. If they find it on your site at the right price, then your chances for a sale are much greater.

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Brainstorm for keywords in your category
There are many ways to brainstorm new keyword phrases. You can examine the content and the meta tags on your competition's Web site to see what phrases they consider important. While this is a good place to start looking for ideas, there's no guarantee they are targeting the best keywords.  You must check these keywords against the corresponding popularity and competition factors. You could also consult with your thesaurus for synonyms and related phrases and correlate these to popularity and competition. Fortunately, WordTracker and the Google AdWords keyword finder tool will do this for you within seconds. Simply type in a word and it will return dozens of the most popular keyword phrases, with the ability to drill down to hundreds more. In fact, the phrases you find here may trigger many new ideas to expand or grow your company's business into areas you had not previously considered.

Choose only relevant keywords
Just because a keyword is popular with a low competition factor, doesn't mean you should target that keyword or phrase. You may be tempted to optimize for phrases that are only loosely related to your site's content -- but DON'T.

The phrases you target must be relevant to what you have to sell. They must also be applicable to what you have to offer on the specific web page you are optimizing.  How many times have you searched Google, landed on a page, and then backed out within 5 seconds of arriving?  That page had a top ranking, but it did not have what you were looking for.

Perhaps the Web site did have what you wanted, but the product resided elsewhere on the site. Unfortunately, your visitor may never know this. If you target a keyword or phrase, then the page they land on must offer the products, services or content that they expect, or you'll be wasting your time and your visitor's time. At the very least, the page should offer direct links to the potential products and services they may expect to find there.

How do you know what people are looking for on your pages? Simply check your Top Search Phrases report in your web tracking software for a list of the keywords people searched on to find each page of your site. You may be surprised to learn that pages are ranking well on phrases that you had never considered. You can also see which keywords and phrases are driving the highest conversion and revenue, to ensure you maximize the return from your SEO effort. Once you identify these pages and search phrases, make sure you are giving the visitor exactly what they expect to find based on the phrases used to find the page.

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Understand that keywords can have multiple meanings
If you have a travel business, then your first thought might be to target the word travel. However, if someone is searching on just plain old "travel" are they:

1. Helping their child with a paper on some aspect of "travel?"
2. Looking for the "travel channel?"
3. Looking to plan a vacation cruise?
4. Preparing to take a business trip?
5. Day dreaming about time travel?
6. Looking for driving directions for their travel across the country?
7. Looking for a travel club such as AAA?
8. Looking for the perfect backpack or hiking supplies for a travel expedition?

If you own a travel agency that specializes in vacation cruises and optimized your site for the single keyword "travel," only a limited number of the people identified in the example above would be qualified prospects. This of course assumes that travel was not too competitive to begin with.

While a top ranking on travel would yield a great deal of visitors to your site, many of them would select the "Back" button in their browsers, turn around and effectively walk out of your store! That's not the outcome you're looking for. When you select more targeted keyword phrases such as "Alaskan Cruise," there is a much higher likelihood that you have focused in on exactly the right audience. It's the difference between attracting actual buyers versus tire kickers.

Doing a quick search with a keyword finder tool is a great way to get a feel for all the keyword variations that your audience may be searching on. You'll also discover which are the most popular, and least competitive. This is not only invaluable in regard to search engine marketing, but for your marketing efforts in general.

This article is copyrighted and has been reprinted with permission from FirstPlace Software, the makers of WebPosition Gold. FirstPlace Software helped define the SEO industry with the introduction of the first product to track your rankings on the major search engines and to help you improve those rankings.  A free trial of WebPosition Gold is available from their Web site.

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