1. Who Is Your Targeted Audience?
Who are your potential customers? What words are they most likely going to use to find your products or services on Google? Write down the top 10-20 key phrases that best describe your services or products. There should be a few words here — not just “lawyer,” but “San Diego divorce lawyer.” Choosing Keywords for Your Website?
2. Where Is The Most Traffic?
Insert your keyword list into the Google AdWords Keyword Selector Tool to find the most searched keywords. Use the synonyms feature to get more ideas. If there is a lot of traffic (in thousands), focus on the exact match only. If there is not, then look at the phrase matches. Rank them in hierarchy of traffic, export them into an excel spreadsheet and highlight the ones you would like to rank for.
3. What Keywords Are The Least Competitive
The easiest way to select the least competitive keywords is to use those key phrases, which contain at least 3-4 words. All 1- and 2-word keywords have HUGE competition. If you’re on a tight budget, focus on long tail keywords (which contain 4 or more words). Choosing Keywords for Your Website?
4. Are Your Keywords Profitable?
Are people, using your selected keywords, looking to buy something? A phrase like “Swiss watches” may have 10x more traffic, but a phrase like “buy a Swiss watch” will bring in the bucks with a higher ROI and will take a much shorter time to rank.
5. Test Your Keywords with Google AdWords before You Invest in Them
Here’s a simple tip that could easily save you 12 months of work: setting up an effective SEO campaign in a competitive market can be a long, drawn out and expensive process. Worse yet, if you are focused on the wrong keywords, you might need to start over again after you find out that your site is not producing the results you want.
An easy way to avoid needing to start over is to test the value of your selected keywords before you heavily commit to your SEO strategy. Buying PPC from Google AdWords allows you to see what keywords drive traffic to your site that converts to leads and clients! Many people waste thousands of dollars to find out later that their keywords don’t bring them the right audience. Test your keywords in AdWords to avoid that. Learn how to do this right. Choosing Keywords for Your Website?
6. Focus & Diversify!
Select a few main keywords which you want to rank high and focus on these keywords until you get the 1st place on Google for each of them. Don’t invest in more than 5 keywords at a time unless you can afford that or if your keywords are long tail keywords (with very low competition). One of the biggest mistakes of many SEOs is trying to reach high rankings for 10 or more highly competitive keywords at once with a low budget.
Nowadays, the best way, used by SEO professionals, to get into the Top 10 of Google, is to target long tail keywords because they are much less competitive, more profitable and less risky. And plus they can bring you the same traffic as a short keyword if you invest in these long tail keywords the same amount of money.
To put it simple, you’ve got 2 options:
OPTION I. You can target some very competitive short keyword that requires, for example, 1000 backlinks to outrank your competition. And you’ll be getting, say, 10,000 of visitors from this keyword per day when you’re #1 on Google for it.
OR
OPTION II. Or you can target some low competitive long tail keywords. For example, you’ll target keywords that require 5 backlinks each for you to be #1 on Google for each of them. By acquiring the same 1,000 of backlinks for these keywords, you’ll be #1 on Google for 200 keywords (1000 / 5 = 200). Usually these 200 keywords will bring you even bigger number of visitors from Google than that 1 short keyword. But even if these 200 keywords bring you the same traffic, this option is still much better because of the following reasons:
- You’ve got a lot of competitors and everyone wants to get high rankings for that short keyword (because it is one of the most popular keyword in your niche). So the competition becomes stronger and stronger from day to day. You acquired 1000 backlinks, your competitor – 1100. You 1200, he – 1300, and so on. So you’ll have to spend more and more and so your profit from it will become less and less. From the other side, a very little number of people know that it is more profitable to target long tail keywords, and so, very little number of companies struggle for long tail keywords. Plus there is very small number of short keywords in any niche and tens and even hundreds more long tail keywords in each niche. So even if someone else also targets long tail keywords, there is a very low probability that he’ll be targeting the same keywords as you. So once you acquired 5 backlinks for your long tail keyword and reached #1 on Google, you may stay there for years before someone else outranks you. That’s why it is much more expensive to compete for short keywords and much more profitable – for long tail.
- Because of the strong competition, you can lose your position for the short keyword at any time! If you lose your position for just that one keyword, you’re in a risk to lose your entire business since you invested a lot of funds in it. From the other side, if you’re #1 on Google for 200 long tail keywords and someone even outranks you for several of them, this won’t influence your business much or even at all.
- It is less risky to target many long tail keywords and is easier to get high rankings on Google for them also because it looks more natural for Google when your backlinks all have different anchor texts and different keywords. And the more natural your backlink profile and your link building campaign looks to Google, the easier it will be for you to get high rankings. And less risky.
- And even if you over-optimize several of your long tail keywords, i.e. get too many backlinks for some of them, and Google lowers your positions for those keywords, you won’t lose your business again since you’ll still have high positions for the rest of your keywords!
- Additionally, long tail keywords have much higher the convertion rate!
That’s why it is much smarter to target long tail keywords! Do you want to find out about other secret and very strong weapon that you can use against your competitors to outrank them and win the business? Sign up and you’ll start to receive our weekly emails with useful info and secret methods that you can use to beat your competition and get #1 on Google.
7. Go The Easy Way.
Select those keywords for which you have already got at least some rankings (for example, you’re somewhere between #2 and #30 on Google) and build backlinks for these keywords. This will allow you to get up to 1,478% traffic increase and ROI for some of such keywords.
From the first look, keywords that bring you not much traffic may look not attractive for you to invest in them. But if you’re #9 on Google for one such keyword and you get, for instance, 200 visits / month from it right now, then by acquiring some links for it and improving your ranking from #9 to #1 for this keyword, according to Google Ranking Traffic Distribution, you will increase your traffic from Google up to 2,956 visits per month for such keyword! (1,478% increase.) So, we recommend you select and target those keywords, for which you’re somewhere between #2 and #30 on Google and acquire backlinks for these keywords in order to get #1 for all of them – even if those keywords don’t look very attractive to you right now.
How to find those keywords, for which you’re somewhere between #2 and #30 on Google?
- Create as long keyword list as possible with as many long tail keywords as possible. For this purpose we recommend you using Free Google Keyword Tool. Submit your most important keywords that best describe your business in this tool and get suggestions from Google in regards to what other related keywords you can use.
- Sign up free over here and submit your website URL and a list of all of your generated keywords including all you’ve got!
- Once this tool checks your site rankings on Google for all of your keywords, make an export to an excel file and then select only those keywords, for which you’re somewhere between #2 and #30 on Google! Woala!
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