Tips on SEO - Find the right keywords

Before you start figuring out which keywords are right for your website, I recommend that you and your company "brainstorm" around the following:

• Which target group or audiences you want to reach with your website?

• What do you want them to do when they visit it?

• What distinguishes you from your competitors?

If a brand new website is relevant, it is very good to wait with the domain name until the keyword analysis is complete. Why? It is simply very good if the URL contains your most important keyword.

OK, now it's time to find the right keywords.

First of all, I want you to understand why single words rarely work when you want people to click on your particular link when it comes up in the search results, why?

Well, people who are looking for a specific item or service do not enter a single keyword but broadens their search to find what they are looking for. A popular word with a large search volume is very rarely relevant to your website's target audience.

Example: Let's say you run a Pizzeria in Hamburg that also makes home deliveries and now plans to open for online orders. Do you get a lot of customers through Google if you place high on the single word "pizza"?

No, of course not. What's likely to give you more customers via Google search are more specific searches for phrases like "online pizza hamburg", "pizza home delivery hamburg" or even "online pizza for home delivery hamburg".

The search volume will be lower but those who visit your website do so because they want to order pizza directly on the web for home delivery in Hamburg.


Now we can move forward with your keywords.

• Now look at the entire site and see what distinguishes each individual page. Try to determine a main theme for each page.

• Take one page at a time and try to familiarize yourself with how you would search the Internet yourself, if you were looking for things that are on this page. It is very good if you can enlist the help of friends, acquaintances and colleagues as well. Make a list of at least ten search phrases (2 - 5 words long).

• When you're done with your list, you'll have at least fifty keyword phrases if the site has five pages, a hundred phrases if you have ten pages. Now all you have to do is do keyword analysis. What did I say now?

Key concepts when talking about keyword analysis are terms such as competition, conversion rate, popularity and click-through rate. Take it easy, we'll go over what the different concepts mean.

Competition = How many web pages are relevant to a particular search phrase and can position themselves high.

Popularity = How many searches are done on a particular search phrase.

Click-through rate = Approximately expected number of clicks on a top placed search phrase.

The conversion rate is a value of the percentage of your visitors who do what you expect when they visit your website. You cannot measure the difference until after optimization. I'll tell you more about this in the blog post about relevance optimization of the text.


Now to the keyword analysis itself.

It involves using some SEO tools to find out which of your search phrases can be expected to provide the most relevant visitors to your website. The ten per side should now be boiled down to two or three per side.

Quick guide, make a simple table with the columns: Popularity/ Search Volume, Competition Level, and Click-Through Rate (AdWords).

1. Check what the competition looks like with Google'sKeyword Planner. Fill in the popularity and competition level columns (estimate 0 – 10).
2. Check the estimated number of clicks for placements 1 – 3 with WordZe (this is based on statistics from Google's sponsored links. Search results in organic results are clicked about 3 times more, so multiply by 3). Fill in the value in the Click-Through Rate column.
3. Evaluate: What you are looking for are search phrases that a) relatively many people search for. (b) has low or medium competition. (c) as high expected click-through rate as possible.

Keyword analysis is a whole little science in itself. I don't go into depth here, but my tips can help you along the way.

Among other things, I use the following keyword tools and I highly recommend it:
Seobook.com has an impressive collection of tools that you can install completely for free in your browser. This SEO tool box contains all the free keyword tools from Google, free tools from Wordtracker and SeoBook.com's keyword suggestion tools as well as some more.


Next Blog post in my ”SEO Tips series” is about text optimization.

On ReBlogging,

Tomas Ohlum

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