Keyword relevance, volume and competition

The one thing I insist you do regarding SEO is thorough keyword research. A typical site owner can tell you what keywords are needed to gain traffic, but those answers are usually very general terms.

Keyword research is market research. I can’t stress this enough. Regardless of whether you know your business or not, you can’t guess which keywords will work for you. There are too many parameters that you have to take into account. NOTE: I said the best terms. It is not the most popular. Keyword research gives you insights about the customer that you may never have seen in traditional marketing channels.

There are many keyword research tools on the market, and for the most part, they all seem to work. That’s mainly because they’re all getting data from the same place. For example, if you type “allintitle:keyword” (substituting the keyword you are researching for), it is possible to determine the number of web pages that use that keyword in the title. Including keywords in the title at least offers a clue that this page is trying to rank for that search term. So that represents an indication of your competition for that keyword. If I just put the same keyword in quotes, Google will tell you how many pages are indexed for that same keyword. If you calculate allintitle/total indexed, you have some index relative to the competition for that keyword. The lower the number, the better. This is just one of many competitive parameters you can use to determine if that keyword is something you should be chasing.

This is not all you have to do. You just need to appreciate that there is a lot of information that search engines will give you regarding your market. Google will even provide search volumes for related keywords used in your market. To find Google’s tool to do this, simply search Google for “Google Free Keyword Research.” The first organic result will take you to that tool. It is a very good tool, but it does not help you much when it comes to targeting the competition correctly. Still it’s a good start.

The biggest mistake I see most companies make, and many SEO companies, is not targeting keywords that you KNOW you can rank for. I’m not suggesting you pick some really obscure keywords that never get used… anyone with half a brain can get you to rank for those. It is also a devious trick of some less than credible SEO companies. I’m saying that you are likely to rank for keywords associated with your business ONLY IF your keywords meet three principles. They are relevant, produce traffic, and are relatively uncompetitive.

There are three factors that you need to consider for each keyword. Relevance, volume and competition. A keyword is relevant if your page represents what the visitor is looking for in relation to the search. Volume is represented by the number of searches for that term, and competition is determined by a number of factors, including those listed above and a review of the current top ten search results to see if you have parity on the site.

Having website parity means that your site carries as much weight as some of the other sites in the SERPS (search engine results pages). If you can beat some of the sites in terms of page rank and inbound links, then you can probably optimize to beat at least some of the current sites.

Ultimately, SEO should be a very predictable process. It doesn’t mean you can be guaranteed a top position, but with the right tools you should be able to characterize how difficult it would be to achieve a top position for a particular keyword.