SEO Keyword Research

If you elect a "competitive" or higher level of search engine optimization, or if you choose to pursue pay-per-click advertising (PPC), our initial task will be to learn what keywords will produce the greatest ROI for you.

For natural search engine optimization or PPC, a Competitive Analysis needs to be done before researching the keywords themselves, because we want to know what keywords your competitors are targeting. That will provide an initial list of keywords to be considered.

We will add to that list by having you tell us all of the keywords you think your customers might use to find your product or services. We will expand the list by having you ask your customers for their perspective. Often the keywords customers actually use are quite different from the ones the marketing industry uses.

The most effective keywords will be the ones that relate to your target market's needs rather than to your business, product or service descriptions. We find that most people are confused about this rather subtle distinction, and as a result they have expectations that are entirely out of line with reality. This confusion leads to frustration all around when websites fail to attract visitors or, having attracted the occasional visitor, fails to turn visitors into customers.

In order to determine which keywords are going to get you a better website ROI, the next step, then, is to find out how frequently each of the keywords on our long list is actually searched, and how many other websites out there are currently competing for top positions for those searches.

The keywords you end up with after keyword research is complete will probably not be the ones that you started out with. It's not that the keywords you are thinking of aren't relevant, they obviously are. It's that they just may not be able to produce a positive ROI for you.

Keyword Search Frequency

One of the most common mistakes website owners make is to choose keywords that make perfect sense to them, and optimize their websites for those keywords without researching them. It seems unnecessary. Then the surprise comes when they discover that no one is actually searching those terms.

It is easy to research keywords to find out how many people search for them. Unfortunately, it is extremely time consuming. We have developed some proprietary tools that help to cut down the time this takes and to make the results easier to work with.

Competition for Popular Keywords

You will be in for a disappointment if the keywords you have your heart set on are ones that are searched on by millions of people every month. Sooner or later you will have to come to an understanding of what top ten placement for extremely popular terms will really require. That is what a Competitive Analyisis will determine. If all the websites in the top ten for a term have hundreds of pages of high-quality, relevant content plus thousands of high-quality incoming links, then your website will need even more pages and even more incoming links.

If you are serious about competing for those kinds of keywords, just remember that Rome wasn't built in a day. Begin now to take the steps to build your site and link popularity for those terms. It may take years, but every journey begins with a single step.

Evaluating Weakly Searched Keywords

On the other hand you may run into the opposite problem. Perhaps there are no frequently searched terms that you can optimize. If there are none at all, or too few to matter, then you would be wasting your money to invest in SEO. However, the situation is almost never that dire.

If you have a reasonable list of sparsely searched terms then you will most likely find that you can compete relatively easily for many / most of them. That means you will probably be able to obtain top ten ranking for a good number of those keywords even if you currently have a very low link popularity.

Consider the value of a "weak" search term that only gets searched on 100 times a month. If you can quickly achieve top ranking on Google, Yahoo and MSN for that term, you have a very high probability of getting a visit from all 100. The typically cited average web conversion rate is 2%. If you do that well, then you will win two sales a month for that very poor term. Do that with several more of your "weak" search terms and your situation starts looking better, especially if your income from each sale is high.

Realistic Results of Keyword Research

The actual results of your keyword research will probably reveal a range of keyword challenges spanning the entire spectrum from "weak" yet easily dominated keywords to keywords that are searched on by the millions but entirely outside your current reach.

Every case is different, but as long as there is some search activity for your keywords there will be a strategy for capitalizing on that traffic.

Ongoing Keyword Research and SEO

Ongoing SEO can focus on constantly maintaining or improving your ranking for your initially optimized keywords.

A more aggressive level of ongoing SEO takes an evolutionary perspective on the attractive keywords that are currently out of reach due to your limited link popularity. Over time, if you steadily improve your link popularity, you will move into position to compete effectively for the more heavily searched keywords.