Keyword relevance, volume and competition

The only thing I insist that you do in regards to SEO is thorough keyword research. A typical site owner can tell you what keywords are needed to gain traffic, but those answers are often very general terms.

Keyword research is market research. I cannot stress this enough. Regardless of whether you know your business or not, you cannot guess which keywords will work for you. There are too many parameters that you have to take into account. NOTE: I said the best terms. It is not the most popular. Keyword research gives you customer insights you’ve probably never seen in traditional marketing channels.

There are many keyword research tools on the market, and for the most part, they all seem to work. That’s mainly because they all get data from the same place. For example, if you type “allintitle:keyword” (substituting the keyword you are researching for), it is possible to determine the number of web pages that use that keyword in their title. Including keywords in the title at least provides a hint that that page is trying to rank for that search term. Therefore, that represents an indication of your competition for that keyword. If I just put the same keyword in quotes, Google will tell you how many pages are indexed for that same keyword. If you calculate allintitle/total indexed, you have some index relative to the competition for that keyword. The lower the number, the better. This is just one of the many competitive parameters you can use to determine if that keyword is something you should be going after.

This is not all you have to do. You just need to appreciate that there is a lot of information that search engines will give you regarding your market. Google will even provide search volumes for related keywords used in your marketplace. To find Google’s tool to do this, simply search on Google: “Google Free Keyword Research”. The first organic result will take you to that tool. It is a very good tool, but it does not help you much when it comes to correctly targeting the competition. Still it’s a good start.

The biggest mistake I see most companies, and many SEO companies, make is not targeting keywords that you KNOW you can rank for. I’m not suggesting you pick some really obscure keywords that are never used…anyone with half a brain can get you to rank for those. It is also a devious trick of some uncredible SEO companies. I am saying that it is possible for you to rank for keywords associated with your business ONLY IF your keywords meet three principles. They are relevant, drive traffic, and are relatively uncompetitive.

There are three factors that you need to consider for each keyword. Relevance, volume and competition. A keyword is relevant if your page represents what the visitor is looking for in relation to the search. Volume is represented by the number of searches for that term, and competition is determined by a number of factors, including those mentioned above and a review of the current top ten search results to see if you have parity across the site.

Having website parity means that your site has as much weight as some of the other sites in the SERPS (search engine results pages). If you can beat some of the sites in terms of page rank and inbound links, then chances are you can optimize to beat at least some of the current sites.

Ultimately, SEO should be a very predictable process. It doesn’t mean you can be guaranteed a top position, but with the right tools you should be able to characterize how difficult it would be to achieve a top position for a particular keyword.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *