Denver SEO – Three Tips to Choosing Your Keywords

Better SEO – Things to Keep In Mind When Choosing Your Keywords

While it can be easy to overlook something as simple as choosing the right keywords, it is one of the biggest blunders you can make in an internet marketing campaign. SEO services that are focusing on wrong keywords doesn’t do any good.  They may bring you traffic, but if they are not relevant you will be increasing your bounce rate instead of your conversion rate. Here are some basic things to keep in mind when choosing your keywords.

1. Relevancy – While it isn’t rocket science, choosing relevant keywords seems to be a difficult task for people to handle.  Broader keywords may have a lot more search traffic, but they generally have more competition and may be used by a wide variety of searchers. When thinking about relevancy you should be looking for a good balance between relevancy and volume, making sure to focus on the people who are searching for what you are offering.
   • Search Volume 
     • While it is true that if you can rank #1 for a keyword that has millions of monthly searches, you will get a ton of traffic, these goals are lofty for smaller Websites and are most likely out of the budget and out of the question.
     • Ranking well for a vague keyword will also bring in a lot of traffic but it will also bring in a lower conversion rate as the purpose of the search is less likely to match your services.
     • If there is little search traffic for a keyword, ranking #1 may not necessarily bring in a large volume of traffic, but the conversion rate will most likely be higher for the traffic that does come in, as they will have searched more specifically for what you are offering.
   • Search Purpose
     • The easiest way to make sure your keywords are reaching your target audience is to put yourself in their shoes. What would you search to find your services? If you can’t look at it objectively, ask your target market directly. This will keep your bounce rate down and allow your Website to convert viewers into customers.
2. Competition – The amount of competition for a keyword is a big indicator of how easy it will be to rank for that term. Make sure you take a look at the amount of competition for the keywords, then analyze the highest ranking Websites to see what it would take to surpass them. If you know your site will not be able to compete with the top dogs for that keyword then it is better to find more viable options via longer, more specific keyword phrases.
3. Your Site – There are a number of factors that go into how your Website ranks. Along with relevance, the search engines factor in your domain age, domain authority (built through inbound links), size of your Website, and how often it is updated. The longer your Website has been registered, the more links to it, the larger it is, and the more often it is updated, the better your Website will rank on search engines.

If some of these items are not part of your current SEO efforts, then you need to be realistic about the keywords with higher competition and search traffic and focus on more narrow keywords.  See also: SEO Basic Tips and Tactics.