Identifying Good Keywords

One of the most overlooked aspects of link building, and SEO in general, is the process of choosing keywords. As with everything else in life, SEO is about opportunity costs.

- If I use this title, I can’t use that one.

- If I focus on ranking these keywords, these other keywords will be neglected.

- If I want to date this person, I can’t date that person… nevermind, bad example.

Well folks, that’s life, and you’ll just have to deal with it. Unless your name is Miley Cyrus, then you can take half-nude or Asian defaming pictures and rank for whatever you want. Generally you want to target 3-5 keywords per page. Anything more or less and your ratios might be a bit skewed. So what 3-5 keywords, and how do you find them? There are a ton of great tools out there that will give you an overwhelming list of keywords your propective buyers may or may not be interested in. The Google Keyword Tool is a great free resource, and although not as robust as other utilities, it is nonetheless free, and we like that. This is a great place to start. If you sell shoes, just type that in and grab yourself some good terms. Then type those in and see what you get. Once you have a good solid list of keywords that you think are relevant to your website and what you are trying to accomplish, it’s time to figure out which ones are the best.

If you have an older site with some existing sales data, then you already know some terms that give you more traffic, other terms that convert better, and some terms with amazingly high bounce rate. If you have this data it’s time to triage and get these narrowed down to the highest traffic and converting terms and focus on those. If you don’t have this data because you’re launching a new site or are just discovering the wonderful world of analytics then I recommend a magic 8ball and some Red Bull. Or you could try running a limited adwords PPC campaign and develop these numbers in a relatively short amount of time, whichever works best for you.

Ok, so now you have a good list of high traffic, high conversion keywords that you want to rank for. Make sure you prioritize these keywords based on your experience or inference as to which will bring in the most traffic, convert at the highest percentage, and have an adequate effort-to-reward ratio. In other words, you may assume that ranking for “running shoes” is going to bring you tons of traffic and convert great, and you’re probably right, but the amount of effort and time involved in getting to page 1 for that term is so high that you will likely not see a return on any investment you make toward that goal for some time. However, going for related but more specific keywords, which may bring in less traffic in direct comparison to the more general ones, is more likely to bring you business in the short term, while also helping to set up a run at the bigger keywords later. For more on this strategy, see this article from Searchengineland on SEOing the “long tail”.

Choosing what keywords you want to rank for is an essential, if not the most essential, phase in any SEO or link building effort.  Much like a military campaign, planning what to attack and when is just as important as executing the attack.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 at 11:53 am and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.