One of the most important aspects of a strong SEO strategy is to find the right keywords for your website. Keywords are the words that that people type into a search engine such as Bing or Google in order to find whatever it is that they are looking for. Your keywords need to be popular enough to bring visitors to your site yet specific enough that they don’t have a lot of competition with other websites. If they are too popular you will be buried low in the rankings under other larger websites and if they are too obscure no one will ever type them in to Google. It can sometimes be a challenging task to find the right keywords.
When you are developing a search engine optimization strategy for a website, one of the first things that you will need to do is to determine what your keywords will be. This requires quite a bit of research into your target market. Here are some tips that will help you with your keyword research:
How Many Keywords Do You Need?
A good question to ask yourself before you get started is how many keywords you are trying to optimize for. This depends on your business and the size of your website. If you have a small website which only has a few pages and sells one product, you will likely be fine with only 5-10 keywords. However, if you have a large website you should go after a larger amount of keywords. You can always add more keywords later, so it is ok to start with an estimate first.
What Are Your Competitors Ranking For?
When you are coming up with keywords you will need to know your competitors to understand what you are up against. Search for some keywords that are relevant to your business and see what comes up in the top search results. Now, try to find out what your competitors are NOT ranking for, because if you can find a keyword that they have missed then you can take advantage of it and swoop in to gather up that traffic.
The Google Keyword Tool
This is one of the most popular and easy to use tools when it comes to figuring out the best keywords to use. It comes along with Google’s Adwords service and it allows you to enter your search terms and see an approximate number of how many times that phrase is searched for per month.
The tool allows you to filter your results by exact match as well as by broad keywords and you can even drill down your search volumes by specifying particular countries or languages. By showing you how many people search for a specific term, this tool allows you to identify keywords which will have low competition and yet are still very relevant to your niche, which are the keywords that you have a good chance of ranking high with.
Alexa Search Stats
This is another tool that you can use in your search for keywords. When you are on the Alexa website, simply enter the URL of any website and at the bottom right of the page it will display popular search phrases which were used to find that site. This can be used to analyse the search terms of your competitors and come up with ideas of which phrases to use.
Finding the right keywords is the first step to a successful SEO campaign and once you have completed this task you will be able to start building these keywords into your website and bringing in more traffic.
Here are some tips for keyword research for your website’s SEO strategy. To learn more about how keywords work, contact the experts at SEO Traffic Lab.
