On the surface, this sounds like a great achievement, but was it the right achievement?

Let me explain ….

When selecting keywords, there are 4 main factors you should be considering:

1. Relevance,
2. Traffic,
3. Commerciability, and
4. Competition.

In other words, to get the best bang for your SEO dollar you want to target terms that are relevant to what you offer, have a large number of people searching on those terms and looking to buy (not just get information), and preferably have a low number of other sites also targeting them.

Relevance is generally pretty obvious – you don’t want to target “dog food” if you are running a restaurant (unless it really is for dogs). However, there are some keywords that are less obvious – it all depends on how others would search for your product/service, not how you would search for it. There are some objective measures of relevance, but I will leave them for a future post.

With the right tools, search traffic is easy to measure. Even Google’s free tools will give you a good estimate of the total search traffic on any given term. With a bit of basic math you can easily work out the sort of traffic you can expect if you reach #1 on the search rankings.

Commerciability is a little harder to get an accurate handle on. This is where a good SEO research tool (or provider) really comes in handy. What you are looking for is keywords that people are searching on when they are ready to buy, as opposed to when they are just looking around. For instance, consider the difference in intent between someone searching on “web hosting” (probably just looking at their options) and “Hostgator coupon” (already decided on what to buy, and is now looking for the best place to buy it from).

Competition is not so much a show-stopper, but it will indicate how long it is likely to take to rank well for your chosen keyword(s). You may want to start out with keywords that have low competition (less than 100,000 competing sites) so that you can quickly reach the top of the search rankings. If the market is lucrative, you may be happy to go after keywords with more competition, but it will probably take longer to reach the top of the search results.

So, how did my friend’s chosen keyword fare against these criteria?

• Her keyword was highly relevant to her product.
• The expected search volume was extremely low, with #1 position expecting only about 3 visitors a day.
• The commerciability was almost zero. People searching on this term were just not opening their wallets/purses.
• Competition was moderate (373,000), so she had done well to get to #2 – PASS.

So my assessment of this keyword was that even though she was ranking #2 on it, she probably wasn’t getting much more traffic. And she would have to work with her copy to turn those additional visitors into buyers.

I passed these comments on to her and asked why she had decided to target that particular keyword. Her reply was interesting:

Our keywords when we did research didn’t include targeted fat loss. We have outsourced video marketing, a few articles… to a team in the US. They found targeted fat loss to be a great long chain keyword so went with it. Since doing this site, we are getting traffic and sign ups, a few a day, but it’s not converting lately. We have had a handful, but would love more, so what you say is hitting home.

Just proves you really need to be careful who you trust your SEO to!

In essence, SEO is about helping the search engines understand that you have quality content on the topics (keywords) that you want to be found for. After all, the search engines really just want to give people the most relevant, high quality content they can for the term the user searched on – your aim is to convince them that content is yours (so that they will send you targeted web traffic).

Many will tell you that it is impossible to keep up with what the search engines want, but the good news is that getting your site ranked on the first page of Google (and other search engines) for your selected keywords rally just boils down to two basic factors:

1. Good quality fresh content on your site
2. Good quantity and quality of incoming links

Both of these factors require ongoing attention in order for your site to rise to the top of the search engines – and stay there.

Of course, this is a very simplistic view of how to ensure your site is seen by people looking for what you have to offer.

There are some additional factors in the way your site is set up, but these are generally fairly easily addressed. Our SEO Site Strategy will identify any issues in this area and offer recommendations for correcting them.

Picking the right keywords to target is also critical. Pick the wrong ones and you may never get to the top of the search engines; or you may get to the top and still get no additional traffic; or, probably worst of all, you could get to the top of the search engines and receive plenty of traffic, but still have no additional sales (because the selected keyword is used by “tyre kickers” not buyers).

Basically, the right keywords = targeted web traffic, the wrong keywords = a waste of time and/or money. Our SEO Site Review will help you identify the keywords that you should be going after for maximum return.

Then there are people who will say you need to use the latest and greatest tricks to ensure Google indexes your content in a favourable way. At the end of the day, Google is getting smarter all the time, and will quickly weed out sites trying to use such “back doors”. All you really need to do is keep adding good quality content that would be of interest to someone searching on your chosen keyword(s).

By far the most important part of the equation is the link building. Put simply, Google believes that if lots of sites link to your content, then it must mean that a lot of people think your content is valuable (at least on that subject). However, gone are the days when Google could be fooled by simply submitting your link to a link farm, who then display it on thousands of unrelated sites. These days, Google wants to see links from relevant sites.

There is nothing complicated about finding such relevant sites and creating the links, but it is rather time consuming. If you would rather spend your time focusing on building your business and providing great content to your prospects and clients, then our SEO Head Start and SEO Domination packages are ideal for you.