With more and more people turning to search engines to find information about a product or service, search engine optimization (SEO) has become an important factor in your business website marketing. Each day hundreds of new websites are being launched, how are you supposed to get your website found? Over the next 5 weeks I will be explaining the basics of SEO to help improve your search engine rankings.
Step 1: Keyword Research – What are people searching for?
If you’re like most people you get excited about a project and jump into it before doing all of the prep-work necessary to make it a success. The same rule applies to search engine optimization, there is a lot of prep-work necessary before jumping into optimizing your website for the products and services you offer.
You need to first determine if 1) people are actually searching for the phrase and 2) how much competition you have for that chosen phrase. Thankfully Google has already built a tool that allows us to get some of that data. Do a search for “keyword tool – google adwords”. Google provides this tool for their AdWords service (also called pay-per-click) but we can use it to gather information about our specific phrases.
Say you are a website design company in Minneapolis, you probably want to people to find your website by searching “minneapolis website design”. Putting this phrase into Google AdWords returns some interesting data. The competition for that phrase is stated as “High” with around 5,000 searches a month. Competing for this phrase directly will take a considerable amount of time (and money).
Your best bet would be to look at the keyword ideas section and find keyword phrases that are either “Medium” or “Low” in the competition column. You can also take phrases from the keyword ideas section and add a geographic location to them, such as “corporate website design minneapolis”. You can see that the competition drops considerably, however so does the amount of searches. This is something in which you’ll have to weigh the return on investment.
With Google Instant competing for the shorter phrases has become more valuable, but may not always give the results the viewer is looking for. These long-tail niche phrases can drive a considerable amount of traffic compared to the high level key phrases and can be much easier to rank well with.
Before committing to a list of keywords for your website you should do some first-hand research and run the searches through Google to see who you are competing with online. Chances are that your local brick and mortar competition will be different from your online competition. Review their websites to see what they are doing in terms of keyword targeting, website structure, and on-site optimization to achieve the rankings.
After determining a list of phrases that fit your business you need to figure out how you want to work these keywords into your website content. Ideally each page of your website should cover a specific topic or keyword / key-phrase. You may have heard of the term “keyword density” before (the amount of keywords compared to the rest of the text). While there is no hard set rule as to how often a keyword should be stated in your text I usually follow the rule of if it sounds goofy then you have it in there too much. The last thing you want is for your text to sound like you are writing for the search engine. This will turn off human visitors and may affect your rankings as it can be similar to keyword stuffing or keyword spamming.
Always remember that search engine optimization is not an instant process, I use the analogy that SEO is like sailing upstream. You should be consistently working on your SEO otherwise you can slide down the list. I always tell clients that a campaign reaches maturity around the one year mark. This does not mean that you will be number 1 for your chosen phrase but you should be seeing a consistent increase in your traffic. Your website will see some gains in traffic quickly but maintaining long term results will take time.
So to recap, before jumping in to optimizing your website you need to do some prep-work. Research your target keywords to see what the competition is and if people are actually searching for that phrase. Remember to be patient with your search engine results as they can take time to increase.
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