If there’s something you want to make sure to do right with SEO, its keyword research. It’s essentially the foundation of your SEO campaign. Choosing bad keywords initially will inevitably doom your entire campaign. In fact, the right keywords will mostly likely be the cause of your campaign’s success. There are 3 basic criteria to look at when coming up with keywords.
- Relevancy
- Competitiveness
- Traffic
Relevancy refers to how appropriate a keyword is to your website. Obviously, you want to choose appropriate keywords. You don’t want to be optimizing a site devoted to telephones for the keyword “computer”. While this example may be somewhat extreme, it does illustrate that you want to optimize your site for keywords relevant to your site. If you’re optimizing for telephones, use telephone-ish keywords. Optimizing for the keyword "telephone" just doesn't make much sense. Don't be too broad with your keywords. Honestly the best thing we can think of you say about keyword research is: please use common sense.
Choosing appropriate keywords isn’t always enough. Some keywords are more competitive than others. The more competitive a keyword, the more difficult it is to rank well for it. Consider the term “real estate”. According to Google’s allintitle tool, there are 74,200,000 sites with that keyword in their title tags alone. That’s a lot of websites to compete with! Choosing a keyword a bit more conservative would be much wiser.
The number of people searching for a given keyword is also important to your research. A keyword that is searched for by a lot of people is a good keyword to go after especially if it’s a low competition keyword. It’s always good to look at the ratio between the competitiveness and search volume of the keyword. You want high search volume/low competitiveness. Google’s Adword keyword research tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) is great for finding the average search volume per month for a given keyword.
Remember, when doing keyword research, take time to find good keywords because they’ll determine the success or failure of your campaign. Choose appropriate keywords with minimal competitiveness and high traffic at first and build from there.
