Choosing the Right Keyword for Fishing More Traffic & Sales

Keywords are words typed in by the searchers in looking for websites that contains information they need. This means that they are the blood that gives life to optimize a website. They are what Search Engine Optimizers are very particular of; just like how particular fishermen are with fishes.

Website without proper keywords to drive traffic and returns of investment (ROI) is like catching a school of fish that draws nothing at all but empty fishnet. Efforts and time are wasted. In business world, that is a serious failure that may remain permanent if not remedied.

How is choosing the right keyword done? Three things must taken into consideration on the process namely; keyword popularity, competitive value of the keyword, and relevance. These elements are important while doing the following three general steps of choosing the right keyword.

Step 1. Keyword Research and Analysis

The keyword researcher should have a mind of a customer or potential customer, not a curious researcher because “business” is what you are dealing here and not “science.” Bear in mind that we are inviting potential customers, not information-hungry internet savvies or lookers. To start, type in words that are more possibly used in accessing products or services offered by your company to test the visibility of your website on the SERP. If it appears on the first page and has good ranking over more than 100,000 websites, it means that you are doing well on the optimization, if otherwise then it’s time to alter or improve the keywords or keyword phrases you used. Keyword popularity is the frequency that words or phrases are used by searchers on a given period of time. This is the basis of knowing the keyword value. The more popular your keyword, the better, but the disadvantageous part is that achieving rankings is very difficult.

It is impractical to have more competitors over the same keywords, so searching for another potential query words or phrases that are popular and not competitive is highly advised. How is it done? It’s easy with the help of WordTracker.com, Google Sandbox Tool, Search Term suggestion tool from Overture, and many more. These tools help you find keywords and decide which of them are appropriate for your web page. Popular keyword shared by a large number of your business competitors in the search engine is not always a good thing unless you top. Remember that the main goal of optimizing your website is traffic with sales conversion and not ranking or traffic alone. Being ranked 10th in the second results page over 30 SERPs is better than being ranked 1st in the keyword that nobody uses at all. Worst, if you’re getting more traffic without conversions happened. Website with high popularity and more traffic is as useless as catching dead fishes if there are no returns of investment (ROI). In addition, the relevance of your keyword is also important. It is tested by this step. Your website must be seen together with the websites having the same theme with yours on the results page.

While doing the keyword research, please avoid single word keyword. Internet users tend to use phrases than single word queries. Being specific, but not too much, is the best way of attracting target audience (potential customers of your products or services). Your company name or trademarks as your keywords must be added with generic ones to make it more accessible to large number of targets, but consider also your unique products or services as well as regional keywords (specified by location). Though it’s difficult to get good ranking in this case, do not worry because SEO companies exist for that purpose if you cannot do it all by yourself. Seek help to trusted SEO companies.

Step 2. Keyword Selection

You must come up with at least 30 keyword phrases that best represent or describe your website after doing the previous step. Keyword selection is done by scrutinizing potential keywords that will drive more traffic and ROI. For instance, a keyword phrase that drives 4000 hits with 20% sales is far better than the other keyword phrase that drives 40,000 hits with .02% sales only—that’s 800 vs. 8 sales. Thumbs up for you if you got 40,000 hits, and for 8 sales, definitely thumbs down.

In this process, more things will be considered such as regional differences of words: “panties” in the Philippines is called undergarments in UK, and “jumper” in UK is called “sweater” in US. Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) measures the value of your keyword and is done with the help of tools mentioned previously (WordTracker.com, Google Sandbox Tool, Search Term suggestion tool from Overture). KEI helps you decide which among the 30 keywords are best for your website.

Step 3. Keyword Placement

SEO experts affirmed that this is the most difficult process because it is done continuously. The keyword density is determined to avoid keyword stuffing. Density range must be 4% to 9% only, or else Mr. Spider will accuse you of spamming. The right placement is decided after seeing results that would take months long. This involves series of experimentation and analysis of results wherein careful iterations are made.

The placement takes place in the Meta Keyword Description, Title Meta Tags, Anchor Text, Title Tag in Anchor Tags, Header Tag Content, Header Tag Content, Alt Tags in Pictures that are Links, Alt Tags in Pictures that are not Links, URL/Filenames, Bold/Italic Tag Content, and Body Text. The keywords in each page of your website must be evenly distributed without exceeding the 9% limit.

If choosing the right keyword is done accurately, expect to bring in more Returns of Investment like tons of fishes that a fisherman draws after the intensive effort of patience and perseverance.