Choosing SEO Keywords

Everyone knows that keywords are an important part of search engine optimisation. Whether you are buying keywords for a PPC campaign or just generally looking to promote certain words or phrases on your site, it is definitely worth making sure you get the right ones. If you choose the wrong keywords, your return on investment will end up being low and your campaigns will have little impact, no matter how hard you work. Get the right keywords, however, and you could have some great success. Here are some tips for choosing your SEO keywords.

How ‘expensive’ is your keyword?
One thing that you need to think about when choosing SEO keywords is how much it will cost you to have success with them. You will no doubt be aware that you have to purchase keywords for your PPC campaigns, but even when you are looking to optimise particular words on your website, you also need to know what it is going to take to get you to the top of the search engine rankings.

This might not necessarily be a monetary cost, but a cost in terms of effort. For instance, if you decided you wanted to get to the top of the Google rankings for the term ‘shoes’, it’s likely to be a pretty tall order. There are companies out there spending millions of dollars and employing whole teams of people to make sure they stay at the top. Achieving the success you want might involve building lots of different webpages and developing links with hundreds of blogs and other sites in order to generate incoming links. In short, it’s going to take resources that most companies don’t have. However, there might be another related keyword that you could get to the top of Google for – and have much more success with it as a result, which brings us on to the nest point…

Think about the variations
Keyword variation is really important and there are quite a few tools that you can use to work out what they are. For instance, Google Adwords will be able to give you keyword variations and common search terms as part of its free service and you can get even more comprehensive offerings if you go for a paid account with Adwords or another provider such as Wordtracker.

Let’s take ‘healthy food’. If you were trying to optimise your site for that keyword, there would be lots of other words and phrases that could also prove beneficial to you as people don’t always search using the term you are interested in. They might search for ‘nutrition’ or ‘diet’ instead, or perhaps be more specific and search for terms such as ‘healthy food retailers in Sheffield city centre’. These all provide you with good keywords options, including some that you could potentially do really well with.

Do your research
This means that you need to do your research. As well as using online tools that give you keyword suggestions and information on people’s search terms, a bit of practical research could also help you. For example, if you have a good customer base, why not ask them what search terms they would use when they were looking for information about your business? They might come up with things you’ve never thought of and what they tell you could potentially be very valuable – after all, they’ve used your services.

Remember the rest of your content
Of course, it’s not just about individual keywords or phrases. If you are going to have success with your SEO, your chosen keywords need to be built into good, quality content. Increasingly, sites with low quality content are being shunted down the search engine rankings, so no matter how hard they work to optimise their keywords, if the quality of the content can’t match it, it won’t have the impact they desire. This means it is more important than ever that you pay close attention to the content you post online. Think carefully about the purpose of each webpage, blog post or comment you make to see where its value comes from, so it is about more than just SEO and promoting your keywords – you need to offer your users a good experience, too.

Think long term
Finally, when it comes to keyword optimisation and SEO, it helps to have a long term strategy. You might not be able to get the top spot on Google for ‘shoes’, but if you continue to write good quality content, build links and optimise your content wherever you can, your site will gradually become more respected and trusted, meaning the effort you put in now will pay off in the long run. SEO is somewhat different to PPC because, while pay-per-click campaigns are often well-suited to short, sharp marketing, SEO often involves playing the long game. Think about where you’re going, what you can do to get there and why you want to do it. As long as you have a clear keyword and general SEO strategy, there’s no reason you shouldn’t get great results.