The First Step To A Good SEO Campaign
The best place – and many SEOs would say the only place – to start your SEO campaign is with a comprehensive keyword research plan. Your SEO campaign can only be as successful as your keyword research in identifying the best keywords for your goals.
When you start your keyword research you should begin with a brainstorm. Write down as many keywords as you think are applicable to your idea. They may not all be. Or they may not be as valuable as you think they will be. Write them down anyway.
Next, you’ll want to use a keyword research tool to help you find related keywords. When you are done with your keyword research you should end up with at least 1,000 keywords – for most niches anyway. Some will have more and some less. But 1,000 starting keywords is a good place to be. Many of those keywords will be “long tail” keywords and that’s OK.
You’ll also want to scope out your competition. Probably your biggest 3-5 competitors is enough. Look at their websites and find out what keywords they are using. Do you see any that are on your list? Do you see any that are not on your list? Add them.
A good keyword research tool should also tell you how many websites are targeting those keywords. Make sure that you get that information. For instance, you might be told that there are 1,450,468 websites at Google that will be on the results pages for a search for a particular keyword. When you are ready to use a keyword, you should perform a manual search at all of the search engines for that keyword and see what the latest number is.
Ultimately, the best keywords are the ones that are perfect for your website. Just because a research tool turned up a list of words doesn’t mean that those are the best ones for your business. Go through your list of keywords and scratch out any that you know are not compatible with your needs. If you are running a PPC campaign then you want to be brutal in that process. With organic SEO it’s not as important as you long are using the keywords that are right for your business. Start with those before you move on to the others.
6 Responses to “The First Step To A Good SEO Campaign”
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal is Written by SEO Expert:
Nick Stamoulis
Tel - 781-999-1222
nick@brickmarketing.com
Brick Marketing - SEO Company
The biggest thing people have to realize when researching keywords is that they keywords they think they should show up for may not actually be the keywords people are searching for.
A lot of people let pride get in the way here, thinking they know more than they really do, and then wonder why they don’t get traffic.
@Jacob Stoops – Agreed, the goal is to rank well and generate visitors from keywords that people are searching for…not “ego” keywords…Thanks for the comment!
I agree, the biggest problem is finding the “perfect” keywords for your site. Most often it is a matter of trial and error. However, sometimes it is quite opposite. Listening to what your customers are saying or asking for can bring surprises. In “salesman talk” that means finding hot buttons. Sometimes your customer’s hot buttons give clues as to how you can tailor your site for keywords you never even considered as important.
@ MikeY – Thanks for your comment. This is very true, finding your customers “hot buttons” is very important in well written, user focused content development.
For keywords with high competition and your target group is searching for, there is still room for well labeled videos and blogs. Happily in our market (Netherlands) there is still lots of opportunities in low hanging fruits in the head of the long tail!
Thanks for the article.
@Tom Zoethout – Thanks for reading, I remember the days when there was a good amount of low hanging keyword fruit in the US.