3 things to consider when choosing keywords for your SEO campaign

Using benchmark keywords to track your rankings and build authority and relevancy for your website is essential for any SEO campaign. Here are 3 things to consider when choosing your ‘benchmark’ keywords.

1. Traffic

Do some investigation to make sure your keywords are actually likely to drive traffic. There are quite a few keyword tools out there that can give an estimate of search volumes, and data from your traffic log or analytics software can tell you what keywords currently drive traffic to your site.

Then once you get rankings for a keyword, go back to your analytics to check that it’s actually driving traffic. If not, consider targeting other keywords.

2. Competition

Choose keywords that you have a good chance of ranking for. If your chosen keyword gets 10,000 searches a day, there’s no use being on page 500 of Google.

For example, if you have a brand new site selling toys, you won’t have the authority or relevancy to rank well for keywords such as ‘toys’, ‘baby toys’ or ‘toy shop’.

So do your keyword research and start building authority and relevancy for ‘long tail’ niche keywords. For example, something like ‘wooden toys for babies under 1 year old’ might be a good one to go for.

There are many ways to evaluate the competition. And doing it probably can take a while. But this is something that your SEO agency will do during the keyword research phase.

3. Relevancy and conversions

Keyword research will probably reveal some great keywords that have high searches and low competition. But there’s no use targeting a keyword unless it’s relevant to your site. Otherwise, you’ll drive traffic but no conversions (sales and enquiries).

But, keyword research can sometimes unveil trends and ‘untapped’ keywords that might affect your business and buying decisions. For example, you might sell women’s jewellery and notice that good search volumes for keywords related to men’s jewellery. With some extra research into the market, you might decide to also sell men’s jewellery products.

Related Posts

1. More on Keywords and SEO
2. Measuring the Success of an SEO Campaign: Rankings
3. Toys.com sells for $5 Million
4. Selecting Keywords with Commercial Intent
5. Measuring the Success of an SEO Campaign: The Long Tail
6. Measuring the Success of an SEO Campaign: Page Yield
7. Joe is back from discovering keywords!!
8. Choosing Not To Track The Conversion From Branded Terms In Your PPC

This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 9:36 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.