How to choose and utilize optimal keywords
Keywords are only as valuable as their relevance to the page where you utilize them.
Remember, your business is only as unique as your decide to brand it. If you fail to recognize the unique aspects of your company, you’ll never tap your entire market and you’ll never reach your full growth potential.
- Depending on the size of your company’s site, the best keywords to target can vary by several areas, including: competition for the keyword.
- Average price for the keyword ad.
- The average number of monthly searches for your keyword.
Most small to medium-size businesses can’t match the volume of content found on major retailer sites. For example, Home Depot or Lowes have hundreds of pages of content internally linked within their site, while the local or regional hardware store may not have more than a dozen or so pages. As a result, many vauge and general keywords will be to competitive to rank for when the local hardware store launches its site.
When you’re contemplating the best keywords to employ for each of your pages, remember to:
Important keywords should be used within in the first few words (50-100, but hopefully even sooner) of your site. The engines do appear to have some preference for pages that employ keywords sooner, rather than later, in the text. With fewer pages of content to utilize, small businesses must be much more efficient with their keywords if they want to gain any traction against the corporations.
Pick keywords that are unique to each respective page. For example, if you’re a bakery, donuts should be one of your pages, and the title for the donuts page should include “donuts”, to distinguish that page from the other food for sale.
Keep your target market in mind.For example: As a sports apparel store woner, would it be smarter to optimize for “performance sports apparel” (A) or “Sports store” (B)? Even though (A) may have 10x’s the amount of traffic; an individual that searches for (B) is likely a better target market. Some people can browse for sports stores for years, without actually buying, while someone searching for the specific design of performance apparel is more likely to convert to a customer.”
One of my clients is Dekin Sports, a new company that specializes in performance sports apparel, including men’s short sleeve T-shirts, sport socks, mesh hats, sport lanyards, team polo shirts and performance shorts. During the keyword evaluation and selection process, we opted to employ keywords unique to the products on each page, rather than general sports apparel terms that are already dominated by Nike, Reebok and other corporations. Within a few weeks, we were ranking among the top 20 results for target keywords.
As your personal SEO consultant, I’ll help you identify the most valuable keywords for your site.
