Search engine optimization, or SEO, begins with creating a keyword list of phrase terms that people are actually using to search for your product or service. You should think of your keyword list as a portfolio of terms with some diversity.
All of the keywords should be relevant to your business so that the quality of visitors coming to your site from that search term is good–the more relevant a keyword is to your business and product offering, the more qualified leads you’ll get from this traffic. The diversity in your list is achieved by having terms that vary from weaker to strongest along a spectrum of competitiveness and varying volumes (from low/long tail to high/head terms). Diversity also comes from having a range of keywords and categories of keywords themselves.
The Difference Between SEO and SEM Keyword Research
Keyword research for search engine optimization (organic or free search) and search engine marketing (paid search efforts) should be different. SEM keyword lists tend to be much larger with specific emphasis around the creation of the campaign structure in bidding systems like Google Adwords.
SEO terms, on the other hand, must be more focused because each phrase needs to be supported with content on the site as well as links (inbound and on-site). To target a keyword in SEM, you simply need to start bidding on it. To target a keyword in SEO, the effort is generally greater, so your target keyword list is likely to be smaller.
7 Steps to Build Your Keyword List
- Look first at your own site: To get started,think about the current content of your site and what search terms this content will support, through organic search. Optify makes this easy by allowing you to simply enter the URL of your website into our keyword suggestion tool and we’ll produce a list of relevant keywords based on the content we find on your website. Remember to include all of your brand terms—and don’t forget to include the major misspellings of your brand names.
- Look at the keywords your competitors target. Your competitor’s websites will contain other content and keyword terms that you might not think of. Again, Optify makes this simple… enter your competitor’s URL into our keyword suggestion tool, and voila, you’ll have more keywords.
- Look at your current organic search visitors. How are people finding you today? The keywords that people are using to find your website today may give you a sense of which types of keywords are working for you and can help focus your thinking.
- Brainstorm: Get a few of your employees in front of a whiteboard and brainstorm keywords that you think are relevant to your business.
- Expand. Aggregate the list you have thus far and then expand it by creating derivatives of those phrases. For example for the keyword term “banner advertisements” you can add “optimizing banner advertisements”, “designing banner advertisements” and “building great banner advertisements”.
- Refine. Cull keywords from the list that are not relevant to your business. To decide what to cut, ask yourself the question, “would someone searching on this keyword term be looking for what our company has to offer?” If the answer is no, then cut the keyword, and focus your efforts elsewhere.
- Enter your keyword list into Optify. Entering your keyword list into Optify is simple–just import it. (Or if you’ve used our keyword suggestion tool, just add the words with one click that we suggest.) If you enter your keyword list in Optify, we’ll tell you where you rank in the search engines on each keyword term and where stand vs. your competition. We’ll also give you suggestion on how to optimize your pages to get more traffic from the keyword terms you’ve selected.
