Long before the constant blog posts, earlier than the social media management and even before the website creation, the first step in branding your online image is doing some in depth keyword research. Since we specialize in starting a business’s online presence, this is something we need to know like we know the back of our mouse pads.
When doing keyword research you should:
- Use some common sense and intuition
- Know your business and its target market
- Understand the difference between short tail and long tail keywords
- Get suggestions on other keywords you may not have thought of
- Find out the difficulty to rank for each key phrase
- Get to implementing the keywords on your site
The first step in your keyword research includes some common sense thinking. Would you imagine ranking for “San Diego internet marketing company” to be easier than “internet marketing”? This is the difference between long tail and short tail keywords. While it would be wonderful to rank for “internet marketing”, these short tail popular keywords actually only make up 30% of the total searches on the web. Attempting to rank for many, specific, long tail keywords will bring in more traffic and result in a much higher ROI than fighting for those popular short phrases.
Think of it this way: these individuals doing long tail keywords are looking for something specific and will be far more likely to stay on your site and purchase what you are selling. When someone Google’s “internet marketing”, they may just be searching for a definition. They may be trying to do research themselves for tutorials or just have no intention of purchasing an internet marketer at all. Compare this to someone searching for “San Diego internet marketing company”. While this may have many less search results, it is far easier to rank for this key phrase, and those searching are far more targeted towards being a potential client.
After using a bit of your intuition and understanding of your business, you can utilize some tools on the internet to complete your keyword research. The first thing we use is Google Adwords Keyword Tool. This is a great program for knowing how many times a certain keyword is searched as well as giving suggestions for similar keywords. Check the example below:
Google Adword Keyword Tool for Keyword Suggestions and Global Monthly Searches
You should check “exact” on the left hand side in order to focus on the exact wording of the key phrase. After finding a healthy amount of keywords, you must then find out the difficulty to rank for these terms. Do not be confused by the competition section of Google Adwords keyword tool, since this is referring to the Pay Per Click section of Adwords. If you would like to create a Google Ad, this competition refers to how much you will likely have to pay for an ad with that keyword. As you can tell, companies already understand the difference between long tail and short tail keywords. For this reason, a highly searched phrase like “marketing” is considered “low” competition for Google ads. Marketing companies recognize that paying for an ad with this keyword would be useless, since the majority of those searching for “marketing” are looking for definitions and a better understanding of the word.
Since you are not trying to buy a Google ad, how do you find out the difficulty of a keyword to rank higher on your SERP (search engine results page)? This involves a little bit of your time, or a little bit of your money. The best way found to do this is to compare the page rank and Page Authority of the top search results for each particular keyword. Every website is given a page rank by google which is a general ranking of how important your page is: 0 being the lowest and 10 being the highest. If the keyword “internet marketing” results on Google turned up only 6-9 PR (page rank) companies, it would be useless for you as a company, as a start up, to compete for this keyword.
An even better way to do this would be to compare each websites Page Authority. Page Authority is done by SEOmoz and it predicts the likelihood of a single page to rank well, regardless of its content. The higher the Page Authority, the greater the potential for that individual page to rank well in search engines. This is calculated by a logarithmic algorithm by SEOmoz and includes numerous factors. In order to see the page authority of a site, you should download a plugin for your browser. The one that we use is called Mozbar and can be downloaded fromSEOmoz. Now, when you complete a search on Google, the results will look like this:
Page Authority highlighted by magnifying glass
As you can tell where I zoomed in, the Page Authority is given right below each webpage. Wikipedia obviously has a very high Page Authority and will be just about impossible to compete with. If you to take the average of the top ten results page authority, it would give you a general understand of how difficult it would be to rank on the first page for that keyword. This is the process that we do whenever we get a new customer to our company in order to find a dozen low competitive, highly searched and targeted key phrases.
We also suggest using SEOmoz keyword difficulty tool, but keep in mind it usually is only available to paying customers.
After doing all of this, you are now ready to start developing your online presence When you build your website, you now know which key phrases to base your content around. Your meta data, alt tags, and information should all include one of your key phrases. When you blog, you want to make sure to use these key phrases frequently, but make sure to still have content others would want to read. Info-graphics, thoughtful content, and a minimum of 300 words are always great for blogs. Since most of you do not have the time or money to do this in-house, all of these services are offered by our company at a minimal price. Check out all of our internet marketing services here.
Now it is all about being persistent! Keep your website looking fresh and blog blog blog! Write two blogs a week with your keywords and interesting content and within a few months time you will see some results you would’ve never thought possible. Remember that SEO is a long term game, you won’t see results overnight!
Author: Sean Aranda
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