Hi there and as I said in a previous post keywords are probably the most vital ingredient to getting good traffic flow but as importantly targeted traffic because bottom line that’s what you want & need.
Many people including us have quite a bit of difficulty in trying get their websites to rank well in the major search engines. It is definitely not something you can just do with your eyes closed, but as with many things having a foundation and starting your journey to the top of the rankings in the right way is very important.
Research is the absolute key
Many people want to rank for specific keywords, but have no idea what they are up against. It might be with some luck that they were able to find a keyword and rank easily for it, but in most instances that would not be the case. It is therefore crucial that you do some proper research at the start to identify the keywords you will be able to rank for.
Attaining top rankings for very competitive keywords are not impossible. It should just be looked at as a long-term goal. There are however often hundreds of related keywords you would be able to target and then in turn get to those top rankings with far less resistance.
Work out a Plan First
The first thing you should do is think about what your end goal is and think about: “What are keyword numbers that I can rank well for?” Explaining this with an example is the easiest way so here goes ……
Here’s An Example
Say you have a news website. It would be wonderful if you could start ranking for a term like “online news” or just “news”. The problem is that you would then need to work past all of the major newspapers as well as sites like cnn.com and bbc.co.uk. So it is better to take a step back and rethink your approach.
A useful tool to use in determining the search volumes for keywords is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, I’ve covered this many times before in previous blogposts, it’s a great tool, quick, simple and free to use. You can type it in Google and it will be the first result that pops up. When accessing this tool you can then type in the word “online news”. You will see that it gets searched around 2,74 million times a month globally. Any keyword that has this many hits are usually very competitive and that means very difficult and time consuming to rank for.
Don’t Try to Run Before You Can Walk
When browsing through the list below it, you will however see a number of related terms and they would have varying monthly searches. You can then start grouping these into different levels. For example get all the words that have over a million monthly hits, those between 100,000 and an million, those between 25,000 and 100,000 and then the rest under 25,000.
This is just a guideline and you can adapt it any way you want to. When you start out it would be the best to try and rank for the lowest group. In this group you will find many longer keyword terms, as I covered in my last post. Targeting these terms works better because you will be able to rank well for them a lot easier.
This point Makes Sense
Picking the low hanging fruit just makes sense. Wouldn’t you rather get 5,000 or 10,000 hits per month each from 5 keyword terms or no hits for a keyword term that gets 250,000 hits per month, but you are stuck on the 10th page? You would have put in the same amount of effort into both, but the path of less resistance will deliver positive results.
As you work on finding the right keywords to rank well for, you will quickly start to understand the value of ranking for the less popular keyword terms first. As you start getting more and more of these rankings, you will also see that you start making progress on the more difficult terms. The sky truly is the limit if you start with the right keyword research.
Tony
