Wow — this keyword gets 600,000 visitors per month…

If I were number one in Google for that, I could retire with the income that would bring in!
Unless you are YouTube, Wikipedia or Facebook, climbing to the pinnacle of the podium on a search term that gets 100,000s of searches each day is going to be a marathon task. It can be done, but it requires planning, hard, long work, a strategy and patience.
When you want an SEO plan to show real, positive results in your business, choosing your keywords is a part of the plan that needs methodical research. This stage is absolutely vital to spend time on, as once you pick these keywords or phrases, you will spend the rest of your time trying to rank for them, so you want to make sure that you pick your battles appropriately, which we can help you with.
Considering which keywords you are going to focus on is critical so that you are targeting words that you can realistically achieve, where you’ll slowly increase your SEO strategy by achieving small wins, rather than wasting your time and money on an unrealistic goal.
Here are some tips to help you choose the most beneficial keywords for your campaign:

Competitiveness

If a high-flying website is at #1, it would take a small army of employees working around the clock for months on end trying to beat them, if you ever did. Trying to fight an “e-battle” that is out of your league is a waste of time, energy and resources.
You need to consider:

  • Age — older websites tend to rank higher
  • Authority — sites with more links from authority or “important” sites get more ranking
  • Page Rank — sites with higher PR get higher rankings
  • Social connections — sites that have more likes and traffic from social media fare much better in the rankings

Lead quality & contextual relevance

Some keywords get millions of searches, but they are comparatively fruitless. Think about people searching for “free guitar lessons” or anything for free. The people searching for this don’t want to pay anything, and you will have an incredibly difficult time trying to pry open their wallets.
If instead, you increase the quality of your keywords to “buying” keywords, you will get higher conversion rates. Some of the main words to avoid in your strategy are:

  • Free
  • Complimentary
  • Free download
  • Cheap/discount (this can be good if you are actually providing a discount good/service — if you aren’t, don’t use this as you will get unqualified traffic)
  • Comp (on the comp)
  • Giveaways
  • Gratis

Get rid of these from your strategy unless corporate philanthropy is one of your hobbies. Have a think about your target buyer and what is going through their mind at the moment they type those words into the search engine — are they actually wanting to buy your services, or are they just a window shopper?

Search volume

It is often overestimated how much volume you need to shake up your accounting department and get them busy processing more transactions. Numbers in the tens and hundreds of thousands are thrown around, without any thought to the above factors of quality and relevance.
If you have an extra 5,000 people visiting your site per month, and your site manages to convert 1% of them into customers, you have just added a powerful income stream to your business, and once you are profitable, scaling up to target more lucrative keywords is a lot easier.
As a final note, quality always beats quantity — especially when you are selling high-end goods or services.
If you require assistance with your keyword strategy or any aspect of your SEO campaign, Bambrick Media’s SEO specialists are based in Brisbane and here to help. You can contact us here or by calling (07) 3216 1151 to chat to one of our team members about our Search Engine Optimisation services and expertise.