Part One: Keyword Research
When conducting keyword research there are several important things to keep in mind:
- Don’t just use your industry terminology. Instead think about what words and phrases your customer will use when searching for your offerings. For example you might use “photovoltaics” around the office. But your customers probably search for “solar panels.”
- Try to focus on search phrases that will be used by people further along in the buying process. See the example below.
- Make sure to look at monthly search volume vs. competitive websites indexed by the search engines for each keyword. The key is to find keywords that will drive optimized numbers of highly targeted, motivated visitors to your website.
Here is an example:
Let’s say you are a Fireplace and Outdoor Kitchen retailer. If you were to target the keyword “fireplaces” it has a very high search volume on Google – 2,740,000 searches per month. It also has over 11 million indexed pages on Google. That’s a lot of competition and it will be a significant challenge to get the page onto the first page of Google.
The other issue with the word “fireplaces” is the nature of searchers using that word. People typing in “fireplaces” are probably very early in the buying process. This means they are just browsing for information to determine what type of fireplace to buy. They will be difficult to convert into buyers, at least in the short term.
Now let’s look at a more specific keyword phrase. Approximately 6,600 people search every month on Google for “cast iron fireplace.” While the search volume is considerably less than “fireplaces,” the indexed page competition is also less at 509,000 pages. Plus searchers are much further along in the buying process as they know exactly what type of fireplace they are looking to purchase.
By targeting the more specific keyword you win on several fronts:
- It will be much easier from an SEO perspective to get onto the first page of Google.
- The quality of the visitor will be higher.
- You will convert more visitors into leads and customers.
What keywords are you targeting for SEO?
Our next blog post will be about conversion architecture – turning visitors into qualified leads.
Comments
Also, the internet is all about targeted niche marketing and communicating directly with your target audience. The time to have "one size fits all" type marketing message is history.
From experience, targeting specific keywords, and have web page(s) that talk specifically to them goes long way for generation of leads using the internet.
Java is software to me , coffee to someone else & maybe a toursit destination to someone esle.
The title competition tells you which pages have that keyword in their title. It will tell you the pages that are focusing on this word. It is great to get ideas from these pages to help with ranking & conversion.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a zero sum game. You have to be better than #2 to be number one. At the end of the day the search engine is a software program that reduces everything to math.