SEO and the Importance of Keyword Research
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Kyle Faber Account Director |
In the Beginning
It is the opinion of both myself and the rest of the SEO world that the basis of any decent SEO campaign starts with keyword research. Without researching which keywords you want to rank for, you will never be able to appropriately target your visitors, clients, and customers to make those beautiful little conversions we all like to make [sell, sell, sell - subscribe, subscribe, subscribe - sign up, sign up, si... well, you get the picture].
To start with, we need to determine a set of core keywords - I like to start with the top 10 - keeps it simple.
Choose Your Core
In Regal Creative's case, we are a full-service web design and graphic design company. Our set of core keywords include:
- Web Design
- Website Design
- Web Site Design
- Graphic Design
- Graphic Design Services
- Search Engine Optimization
- SEO
The core set of keywords will contain a combination of approx. 1-3 words for each keyword phrase.
Look Beyond your Horizons
After developing this list of core keywords, we want to open up our vision and expand upon it - greatly! We do this by pulling out our dictionary and thesaurus [or going to www.dictionary.com], checking synonyms, word alternatives, combinations of the core set, word alternatives and synonyms of those combinations, and so on. Also, we want to take a look at what our competition is trying to optimize for by checking their page titles, links, H tags, content, and so on. In the end, we usually end up with about 1,000 different keywords on our list, sometimes much, much more - depending on the industry, naturally.
After you have your initial list assembled, it's then time to.... assemble more! I like to scan the internet - forums, blogs, message boards, industry related websites; also i like to take a look a industry articles, magazines, etc. These all offer great opportunities to find new things happening that we can use in our quest for new keywords.
Choose Wisely
After we have our keyword list all built up with thousands of keywords to choose from, now it's time to try and scale it down again. Running the list through keyword research tools that show us monthly/yearly traffic estimates we can see that some keywords we thought would be great for our optimization, actually have very little to no traffic for them - take them off the list. [At this point, you should not feel bad for removing keywords from your list, it won't hurt their feelings, and who wants something that won't produce anyway? This is the Darwin of Keyword Research.]
This is all a time consuming process, but look at it this way, once you start your SEO campaign with your specified set of keywords, you're stuck with it. All efforts you put into this will be lost the moment you change your direction, so you want to get it right, and you've got to do it the first time.
When going through your list, as mentioned before, you want to be checking for keywords that are not specifically geared toward your set goals. When you identify those non-specific keywords, cross them off your list. You also want to be checking the traffic estimates for the keywords you identify as goal-orientated. If some of these keywords have little to no traffic associated with them, get rid of them as well. In the end, you will end up with a list that is both specific to your goals, and offers decent traffic estimates.
With this list we will now begin to fully analyze our competition, develop the structure of our website, and create the rich content that will attract our visitors to turn into our goal, whether that be buying our product, subscribing to our magazine or newsletter, signing up for a service, etc.
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