If you are busy with a search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign, the first step is to always do some keyword research where you can select the best keywords to use in your campaign. These are not just any keywords related to your services or products, but keywords that people will actually use to search for your business online. To start with your SEO keyword research and to make sure you are using the best ones, base your keywords on search volume, competition, buyers, and relevance.
There are many keyword tools available that you can use that will generate hundreds of keyword phrases together with the relevance, search volume and the pages that these keywords are competing against. Once you have a list of keywords, select the best ones based on relevance. Here’s a couple of tips to start with this.
Keywords for SEO
Search volume: Keywords with a higher search volume might have a lot of competition, but isn’t impossible to rank for. Pick a couple of these together with other phrases that describes a selling sequence eg: buy “keyword”, etc. Never only use keywords based on the highest search volume as this will make your campaign so much harder.
Competition: Have a look at the competition pages already ranking for the phrases you have chosen. How are they using these keywords? Are they focusing on long tail (more than one keyword) combinations? If they are not, you have a huge opportunity in optimising your campaign for long tail phrases.
Buyers: These are almost the same as long tail phrases but describes what people are searching for in more detail. “buy (keyword), product, service in (region)”. These are very specific and can usually be ranked for easily.
Relevance: The keywords that you are going to use should always be relevant to your business and what your target audience will be using when using Google. Be smart about picking the right keywords and do thorough research because it may take a while before good solid rankings are achieved with your SEO campaign.
