In any SEO project, keywords are essential and it’s one of the first things that we need to consider when start out with the project. If you have the right keyword, you are in the correct path of having proper SEO strategy. The keyword that you choose will make all the difference. Choosing the right keyword will also allow you to save both time and money. It also means that SEO is all about good strategy and planning. If you have the wrong keyword, you will struggle immensely and you will have to spend more effort to achieve specific goal. Choose poorly and you need to face the consequence in terms of steep money and time expenditure. You need to start by brainstorming as many potential keywords as possible. You also need to choose keywords, although they are only indirectly related.
The next step is to perform the elimination process and it’s about eliminating excess keywords that may provide you with limited results. Each of your webpage should be optimized for only two or three keywords or key phrases. If you focus on too many keywords, you will lose focus and search engine bots won’t be able to put significant emphasis on the actual topic of your webpage. In some cases, fairly obscure keywords can be a better choice for your new webpage, if they guarantee at least a trickle of immediate traffic today and with potential growth in the future. Simple and straightforward keywords are often not a good choice, if they are highly competitive and many other websites have used them for their webpages.
You should be able to get a feel for the current level of competition by performing simple searches. You will know whether a keyword is hotly contested or not. Check all the top 10 results in Google and see whether they have been strongly entrenched in the position. Google Analytics and Wordtracker are useful tools for SEO professionals, because they can tell us the amount of searches or demands for specific keywords. With both tools, you will be able to determine the amount of effort needed to achieve something. The more searches, the more potential traffic that you get. On the other hand, the more results in search engine, the more competition that you will face. This is also a good opportunity to know whether specific obscure keywords or phrases will work better, compared to more popular ones.
As an example, the term “car seller” is highly competitive and you will find thousands of websites have been competing intensely for it for many years. It is better to include your geographical location to narrow down the focus. The competition will be significantly reduced and it is actually a good decision, because it’s likely that your buyers are actually local residents. If you are living in a big city and the competition level is still high, you could still narrow it down to your precise geographical location. However, you shouldn’t narrow the term down too much, because you may lose traffic potentials.