Keywords are an important part of SEO—arguably the most important part. However, it can be difficult for even established website masters to identify what keywords and phrases will work best for them. Whether you are looking for organic or paid traffic, your keywords will determine your success in almost all cases. Here are a few ways to find the keywords that will drive traffic your way.
- Think like a searcher. This is a very basic SEO concept, but one that seems to be overlooked by many. What phrases, adjectives, modifiers and even misspellings are commonly used by people looking for a website like yours? In order are people using these keywords? If you are having trouble getting inside the minds of your searchers, turn to your website analytics. You can see there what keywords are driving the most traffic your way and also which are producing the most income. In many cases, the results will surprise you—and hopefully inspire you as well. Similarly, identify what keywords are simply not working. Whether this is due to heavy competition or a simple lack of interest, its best to abandon these and focus on strategies that actually work.
- Copy your competition. Not in a way that gets you blacklisted, of course! What I mean is to look at what keywords your biggest competitors are using. You can usually deduce this from their meta-tags, link anchor text, and other information. You don’t want to copy them exactly, but examining their strategy may give you a general idea of the direction you need to go in.
- Don’t get distracted by volume. When you are just beginning a website, any traffic seems like a good thing. You become obsessed with page rank and numbers of unique daily visitors. However, in the long run traffic does not always equal income. In fact, if you are paying for search engine traffic, it can mean just the opposite. Consider your sales rate for key terms as well as your bounce rate. Focus not on the keywords that are bringing in the most people, but the ones that are bringing in the most money.
- Avoid pay per click. Many people get caught up in the idea that they can get the same result of a high page rank from pay per click campaigns, and that these campaigns are therefore worth it. However, the easy way is rarely so easy, and this is no exception. Pay per click companies aren’t paying per sale, so look closely at your sales figures to see if you are getting your money’s worth. Hint: in most cases, you aren’t. Most of the time, you can get the same or better results from simply optimizing for the right phrases.
- Consider negative matches. If you are running pay per click, or PPC campaigns (don’t say we didn’t tell you so!), you can at least use them for information. Pay close attention to what keywords are falsely driving traffic to your website. By ‘falsely’, we mean that they are bringing you traffic, but not bringing you sales. Sometimes when you look at this information, you see search terms that are clearly not right for your website. You can then set these as negative matches both for paid and organic results. This will ensure that you get only people who are actually interested, and take a chunk out of your ad budget as well.
- Focus on long-tail keywords. That is, think of longer phrases that are both more likely to funnel highly directed traffic your way and less likely to put you in direct competition with the big guys in your field. These can often take you a long way, but check out the next suggestion as well.
- Add shorter, higher volume phrases once you are established. Once you have built up a decent amount of income from long-tail or niche phrasing, you can begin to move in on your competitors’ territory by experimenting with short, high volume keywords. It seems counterintuitive to switch strategies once you have found one that really works, and we aren’t suggesting that. Add your high volume, short phrases to your long-tail keywords, but don’t replace them altogether.
- Use keywords as business inspiration. When you see what terms are bringing the most traffic, you may find a few surprises. Perhaps people are visiting your website in search of a product or content idea that you are not offering—if you are really lucky, it might even be one that is simply not offered anywhere. This information can be used not just for SEO, but to plan the direction of your business so that you reach these untapped markets. Traffic will naturally flow toward this content because there is little else to serve them.
- Evaluate and re-evaluate constantly. Using the above methods likely left you with a long list of keywords. Save this list, but don’t do anything with it yet except for gleaning the few most promising keywords from it. Focus on these few keywords and watch how much they earn. If a certain keyword is getting your website first page search engine results and earning you money, continue to focus on that word or phrase while introducing new and similar keywords from your list. If you are constantly in the process of changing and moving toward higher volume and higher selling phrases, your business is bound to grow in both page rank and income.
- Avoid grey hat tactics. It may be tempting to go over to the dark side, especially when you see how much money the dark side is making. However, this is almost always a short term deal for them. Black hat sites have to constantly move and rebuild, never gaining a customer base or any kind of momentum. If you are trying to build a long term web business, stay with completely legitimate practices both in identifying keywords and in using them. All of your hard work and investment will pay off in the long term.
