How To Choose Keywords For Your SEO Strategy

So, you have your new website ready or being built, next stage is to bring traffic to the new site. But where do you start, well besides PPC there is SEO (search engine optimisation).  This is the process where you gain placements or free rankings in the organic listings in Googles search results, totally free by the way. Well the traffic is free the process to gain these free rankings usually requires hiring an SEO consultant or company.

The first part of a well thought out SEO strategy is to decide what keywords you want your website to place high for in search results when people type in these phrases. It is vital to get this right as you could waste money on keywords that only bring in poor quality and irrelevant traffic or low volumes of traffic.  You want to rank high for keywords that get searched the most, yet you also need to be realistic. If your budget for SEO is £200 a month you will never rank number 1 for keywords such as “loans” or insurance”, large companies spend thousands a month targeting those phrases. So, you need to find a balance between choosing keywords not too competitive, are relevant to your business and also have search volume making the keywords worth ranking for.

Also be ware if you are hiring an SEO firm of being offered recommendations of keywords that are too long, we call these “longtail” and whilst some can bring in traffic and be easier to rank for some could be being suggested to you by companies as they are easy to rank for but will bring in little to no traffic. Phrases 4 or 5 words long might be easy to rank for but might also have little search volume. At best try keep it to 3 words maximum in a phrase.

Also try choose keywords relevant to your business, for example if you offer life insurance don’t target the word “insurance”. Or if you offer a certain car makes parts then target “ford car parts” rather then “car parts”. A good way to get ideas and suggestions for keywords as well as to see how many times it’s being searched in Google is to use the Google Adwords keyword Planner tool. This allows you to put in a few keywords and then see suggestions related to these keywords and also search volume.  Or if you already have a list of keywords and phrases simply copy and paste these in and see the search volume per month.  From there you can choose which keywords to target for your SEO strategy. Remember though your budget for SEO might play a part so always choose keywords which are first and foremost relevant to your business and secondly not too competitive, so stick to 2 or 3 worded phrases, singular keywords are notoriously harder to gain any rankings for.

A free ranking for your chosen keyword phrases can bring in hundreds and thousands of visitors a year and always remember this is free traffic.  It’s also free advertising 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. So well worth putting the effort into. Just make sure you do your keyword research beforehand and select the right keywords and phrases for your business.