PPC and SEO Keyword Research

If you elect a "competitive" or higher level of search engine optimization, or if you choose to pursue pay-per-click advertising (PPC), our initial task will be to learn what keywords will produce the greatest ROI for you.

If you would like to understand what keyword research is, read on. If you would like a non-technical discussion, see our article on how to choose the right keywords for SEO.

The most effective keywords are usually the ones that relate to your target market's needs rather than to your business, product or service descriptions, but every keyword has its place in your overall search engine marketing strategy.

Keyword Search Frequency

One of the most common mistakes website owners make is to choose keywords that make perfect sense to them, and optimize their websites for those keywords without researching them. It seems unnecessary. Then the surprise comes when they discover that no one is actually searching those terms.

It is easy to research keywords to find out how many people search for them. Unfortunately, it is extremely time consuming. We have developed some proprietary tools that help to cut down the time this takes and to make the results easier to work with.

Competition for Popular Keywords

You will be in for a disappointment if the keywords you have your heart set on are ones that are searched on by millions of people every month. Popular keywords always have a lot of websites competing for that traffic. How many is "a lot"? A million is a lot, but it is usually much worse than that. The competition for 'website design', for example, is over a billion websites!

A Competitive Analysis will determine exactly what it will take to compete. If all the websites in the top ten for a term have hundreds of pages of high-quality, relevant content plus thousands of high-quality incoming links, then your website will need even more pages and even more incoming links. In the case of the billion sites competing for 'website design' it turns out that many (if not most) of the top ten sites have been around for at least ten years!

If you are serious about competing for those kinds of keywords, just remember that Rome wasn't built in a day. Begin now to take the steps to build your site and link popularity for those terms. It may take years, but every journey begins with a single step.

Evaluating Weakly Searched Keywords

On the other hand you may run into the opposite problem. Perhaps there are no frequently searched terms that you can optimize. If there are none at all, or too few to matter, then you would be wasting your money to invest in SEO. However, the situation is almost never that dire.

If you have a reasonable list of sparsely searched terms then you will most likely find that you can compete relatively easily for many / most of them. That means you will probably be able to obtain top ten ranking for a good number of those keywords even if you currently have a very low link popularity.

Consider the value of a "weak" search term that only gets searched on 100 times a month. If you can quickly achieve top ranking on Google, Yahoo and MSN for that term, you have a very high probability of getting a visit from all 100. The typically cited average web conversion rate is 2%. If you do that well, then you will win two sales a month for that very poor term. Do that with several more of your "weak" search terms and your situation starts looking better, especially if your income from each sale is high.

Realistic Results of Keyword Research

The actual results of your keyword research will probably reveal a range of keyword challenges spanning the entire spectrum from "weak" yet easily dominated keywords to keywords that are searched on by the millions but entirely outside your current reach.

Every case is different, but as long as there is some search activity for your keywords there will be a strategy for capitalizing on that traffic.

Ongoing Keyword Research and SEO

Ongoing SEO can focus on constantly maintaining or improving your ranking for your initially optimized keywords.