SEO Success Starts With Keyword Research
Keyword research is the first step
in the SEO process. It is also one of the most important parts of the
search engine optimization process. If you target the wrong keywords, you’ll be
wasting your time and money.
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When doing keyword research, there
are three components to consider before selecting the keywords you want to
target. They are:
- Number of Searches
- Competition
- Search Intent
You want keywords that get a decent
amount of searches without a lot of competition where the intent of the search
matches the goals of the web page you are trying to rank for. With this
combination, you’ll be able to rank more easily and much quicker and you’ll
have better conversions.
How Many Searches? More Is NOT
Always Better
If you are a chiropractor in
Minneapolis who has just started your own practice, what keyword do you think
you should target – “chiropractor” or “chiropractor minneapolis”? Let’s use the
Google Keyword Tool and see how many exact
searches each one gets every month. Here is what we see:
“Chiropractor” gets 110,000 searches
while “chiropractor Minneapolis” gets 320 searches. It’s obvious “chiropractor”
is what you should target, right? Not so fast.
“Chiropractor” gets significantly
more searches but which one is more targeted to your potential customer base
and which one is likely to be easier to rank for? I’ll give you a hint:
“chiropractor Minneapolis”
If you have a lot of money and time
to commit to getting ranked for “chiropractor” it could be done, but would it
be worth it? Sure you might get a lot of traffic but what kind of conversions
would you have? After all, how many people searching for the generic term,
“chiropractor,” are actually looking for chiropractic care? And how many of
them live in the Minneapolis area?
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When using the Google Keyword Tool
there are three different keyword match types that Google returns data for.
They are broad, exact, and phrase match. You want to look at the exact and
phrase match data when selecting keywords to target. That is why we looked at
the exact match data in our example.
How Much Competition Is There?
There are several things to look at
when sizing up the competition, but the primary things you’re looking at are
domain age, page rank (PR), and the number of backlinks to a site. The older
the domain, the higher the PR, and the more backlinks – the stiffer the
competition.
Using our favorite SEO tool, we search for “chiropractor Minneapolis” to see what the
SEO competition looks like for the websites on the first page of Google for
that keyword. Here is what we see:
The results are a little hard to see
but the average age of the domains is 7 years and most of the sites have a PR
between 1 and 3. The website with the most backlinks has 2,149 backlinks while
the website with the least backlinks has 0! Just looking at this data, the
competition isn’t that bad at all.
If you properly optimized a web page
for this keyword and did the monthly SEO required (i.e. obtained backlinks
every month), you could rank on Google (the first page specifically) within a
few months. Contrast that with the competition for just “chiropractor”:
There are a few websites that are 12
years old with a PR as high as 5. A handful of websites have more than 10,000
backlinks with one having as many as 62,619 backlinks! As you can expect, a
very broad keyword like this has lots of competition. It would take several
months and a lot of time and effort (and money) to get ranked for this keyword!
Search Intent
Another consideration of the keyword
selection process is the search intent. You want to make sure that the intent
of the search matches the goals you have for the web page you’re trying to rank
for. If the intent matches the goals, you’ll get better conversions.
For example, if you are trying to
get a page on your website to rank for “sports chiropractor” and your practice
is located in Minneapolis, then you want to research and target keywords
specifically about “sports chiropractor” and not “family chiropractor” or
“child chiropractor” etc. In addition, you want to rank for those keywords with
Minneapolis as part of the keyword. Instead of “sports chiropractor,” you’d
want to consider, “sports chiropractor Minneapolis” instead.
Bonus Tips on Keyword Selection
Here are a few bonus tips when doing
your keyword research and selection:
Think like your customer! Just
because you know your industry, don’t assume everyone else does. Don’t just
think of the keywords you’d use to find your products or services. If this is
difficult for you to do, just ask a family member or friend who’s not in your
industry what they’d search for to find your products and services.
Think like an industry expert. O.K,
this totally contradicts the first tip but there are people in your industry
that may be looking for your products and services so consider keywords that
are specific to your industry.
Don’t target too many keywords for
each page on your website. This is a common mistake. Keep your keywords laser
focused. We like to target no more than 1-3 keywords per page and we keep the
keywords closely related.
SEO takes time if you would lke to hire an SEO Professional contact SEO Martian, a leading minneapolis seo company, providing seo to businesses Nationwide.
Results Business Marketing
St Paul, Minneapolis, Mn
612-327-5756
