Reality Check: An Easy Guide to Keywords and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Website owners need to have realistic expectations when it comes to the world of keyword selection.
It’s essential to understand your audience, as well as to appropriately target powerful, tight keywords that aren’t vague or generic—those broad, expansive keywords that rarely attract the audience you’re looking for—and lead to disappointing rankings and wasteful spending of cash.
If you want a healthy return on investment (ROI) with search engine optimization (SEO), your success – or failure – depends on the keywords you choose when combined with other factors such as link popularity and website design.
If your website has barriers in terms of content and design, lacks saturation (a term used to describe how well a site is indexed by search engines) and is not found on many other relevant websites, your chances of ranking well are quite low.
Be careful with your keyword research so you don’t miss out on great opportunities or target so broadly that you target phrases that will never rank well. Get yourself together. Here are 5 tips to guide you on your research journey. They can help you make good choices, achieve high rankings, and bring more traffic (and leads) to your website.
1. Know your audience and consider your business goals.
Many businesses just pick keywords out of thin air. They don’t talk to customers or hot prospects to determine what might be a useful set of keywords. Your keywords should match your business strategy. What are your main products? Where are sales lagging? Are there products or services that are doing well and could jump with SEO? Which products have the highest margin? You should have dozens of other questions that make sense for your business. Information should be easily accessible. If it’s not, you’re way behind in the SEO process.
2. Watch broad search terms.
Companies make mistakes in this area more than anywhere else. The landscape of a keyword is more attractive than an hour’s shopping at a toy store for a child. Excitement forces people to ignore reality. Who can blame them? Wouldn’t it be great to be #1 on Google for “food”, “cars”, “software”? Yes, single words can help increase sales. But they are difficult to achieve. Link popularity, website content, site structure and other considerations will affect rankings.
3. Learn how to form search terms.
You can start with “car” as much as you want, but build on your main phrase by adding other words like “suppliers”, “products”, “services”, “companies”, “firms”.
4. Analyze the log files.
Often overlooked and easily downplayed, website logs reveal a lot about how people search. You can generate many ideas for keywords and search phrases just by exploring the data intuitively.
5. Know your link popularity.
First you need to know your competitors – compare their link popularity with yours. How far do you have to go to catch up? Research who else has links to their site. Would you like these websites to link to your site? Will you need to exchange links with them? Use the link popularity check service (www.checkyourlinkpopularity.com) to check how your site is doing with link popularity.
Get additional keyword tips with our free Keyword Development Report. Our FREE guide, Reality Check: The Right Guide to Keywords and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps business owners navigate the often-misunderstood world of keyword selection, including how to choose the right words and mistakes to avoid
Get your copy today of our SEO white paper here:
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