Considerations in developing your SEO Keyword Strategy
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is absolutely crucial to the success of any online venture. Because the majority of sites are found through Google searches, you need to do whatever you can to ensure that when a potential customer searches for something you offer, your content appears as near to the top of their list of results as possible.
One of the most important techniques in SEO, is the keywords in your content. This is quite simply because as Google looks for content relevant to a search, it checks for the density of the search terms entered by the user. By using the right keywords at the right density, you achieve better page rankings. Of course, employing keywords is not as simple as it might immediately sound. Here are some things to consider:
Uniqueness
In many cases, the product or service you are trying to promote is not, when described in basic, search keyword terms, unique on the global internet. This can make it very difficult to identify the best keywords to use in your SEO strategy. If you are in a market where thousands of other businesses are competing with you for the Google top spot on a very common set of keywords like “cheap laptops” or “web design”, you are going to have a far more difficult task on your hands than if what you offer is more niche, like say “restaurant in Toowoomba”. The key to success is to strike a balance in your strategy between broad and narrow search terms.
Natural Search Terms
How you think about your business, and even how you want to represent yourself as a brand, may be at odds with what your customers would naturally search for. As an example, you may offer “mobile productivity solutions”, but your customer would probably just search for “iPhone apps”. Think about the other names or descriptors people might use when looking for what you do, and include them all in your strategy. If you are looking for global reach, then also think about different terminology used in other countries, for example American English versus Australian, Canadian and UK English.
Lateral Thinking
Sometimes, the thing you are trying to promote is something new or unusual, which is hard to define keywords for because your potential customers don’t know about it yet. In this case, you need to come up with a very strong keyword strategy that will bring in people with relevant interests or problems, and include content about those topics in which you can introduce your own offering. This can require a lot of lateral thinking, but will be crucial if you need to bring in traffic from Google searches.
An SEO keyword strategy can be a strong ally or a serious point of failure for any commercial website, and is not something you should put together based solely on your first instincts. By researching, using some of the tools available online, or working with an SEO specialist, you can put together a strategy that when implemented in some great content, will win you not only traffic, but business.
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