The first step in choosing the right seo keywords is deciding which keywords to optimize your site for. Keywords are what users type into the search box for their search query. Three primary criteria go into selecting the right seo keywords to optimize your website: Relevance, Volume and Difficulty.
Relevance: One of the key factors in selecting the right SEO keywords.
You want to pick SEO keywords related to your business. When crafting your list of possible keywords, it is best to think from the prospect’s perspective. Try to think about what keywords a prospect looking for your product or service is likely to type into Google. Come up with many variations.
Estimated Search Volume
Even if you get the number one spot in the Google search for a keyword, it doesn’t guarantee your going to get lots of visitors to your website. The amount of traffic you will drive to your website is dependent on how many people search on that keyword. To pick great keywords, you need to have sense of approximate number of times user search for that word in Google. Check the resources section at the end of the book for information on tools you can use to help with determining search volume of keywords.
Difficulty
This is the measure of how hard it will be to rank for the seo keyword, based on the strength of the competition and your own website authority. Ranking well in Google is a competition. Of thousands of the web pages trying to rank for a given keyword, only 10 can make it to the frontpage. So if you have a new website and are trying to break into the top 10, you’ll have to displace someone else. For some keywords, this is relatively easy to do, if the existing top 10 are relatively weak. For competitive keywords, the strength of the competition may be high, and ranking on the first page may be very difficult.
Picking the best seo keywords is an exercise in balancing these three factors: relevance, search volume and difficulty. You shouldn’t just solve for one factor. For example, picking a relevant keyword that has very high volume is not going to mean much if the difficulty is so high that you’ll never be able to rank. Similarly, picking very easy words that have very weak competition is not going to generate much traffic if only few people a month use that terms to search.
When picking your SEO keywords you should start with a list of relevant keywords for your business. Then, determine what the estimated volume is for those keywords and how much competition there is that for keywords. If you are just getting started, you should probably begin with keywords that have relatively low competition. If your website doesn’t have much authority yet in the eyes of Google, you’re unlikely to rank well for a highly competitive keyword. In addition, if you don’t make it into the first page of the search result, you are not likely to get much traffic from those keywords. Choose keywords that have relatively low competition instead. Then, as you build authority for your web pages, and start ranking for these keywords that have more competition.
