How to Choose Keywords

We’ve been writing here for several weeks now, and have mentioned several times how important it is to find good keywords. Still, we’ve never actually told you how to do so.

Well, we’ve been remiss. So here is Keyword Research 101:

Go to Google’s Free Keyword Tool. Type in a keyword you think your target market uses to find the services/products you offer. For our purposes here, we’re going to use “dog collars.”

If you type in the term, you’ll see that there were about 246,000 “global monthly searches” for that term. Which shows that you don’t want to use the term “dog collars” as a keyword because too many other sites use it. (You should aim for a search volume of between 8,000-30,000 global monthly searches.)

But you’ll also see other keyword phrases. “Dog collars and leashes,” for example has 14,800 global monthly searches (which meets our criteria of between 8-30K in searches).

But let’s see if we can drill down a bit more, because the more keywords we come up with that don’t have a ton of competition, the better.

So let’s type in “dog collars and leashes” in the “Find Keywords” box at the top left of the page. What comes up? “Designer dog collars,” with a global monthly search total of 12,100; “dog collar leashes,” with a 14,800 global monthly search total; “personalized dog collars,” with a global monthly search total of 9,900; and more. All of these would be good terms to use on a website when taking into account our 8K-30K global monthly search numbers mentioned above. (These totals may change if you perform this search as a trial; global monthly search results can change from day to day.)

You’ll also see some search terms that have less than 8,000 monthly search results. “Designer dog collar” and “studded dog collar” each have 4,400 and 5,400 global monthly searches respectively. You could use these as keywords on secondary pages. Or you could even try these keywords on some pages to see how you do.

The results page gives you dozens of different keyword phrases you could use on your website.

Be sure to place keywords you select in your meta title tags. Also use the same keywords in that page’s content, using one keyword/keyword phrase) in your title and in the first 150 words of your copy. You should also aim to have your keywords appear at least two or three additional times (in a 400-500 word page) and be sure to have it appear in your page’s last paragraph.

Let GoiMarketing.com take your keyword research up several notches by allowing us to optimize your website. We’re experts at site optimization and keyword research. Contact us today so that we may get your website to the top of the search engines.

 

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