SEO & Traffic Reports - Part 2: Choosing the Right Keywords

The Science and Art of Keyword Optimization.

Keywords are the heart and soul of search engine optimization. Without the right keywords, potential customers won’t be able to find you online. However, the right keywords will enable you to dominate your competition.

So, how do you find those magic keywords?

The first thing to do is to come up with some ideas for keywords and phrases that would be relevant to your site. Keywords you think people might use to find your website, products, or services. There are several great ways to do this:

Brainstorm. Brainstorm all the keywords that you might enter when searching from something on your site. This is actually fun. Imagine yourself in your customer’s shoes what problems might they be looking to solve and how would they search for solutions?

Keyword tools. Type a generic keyword into a keyword generating tool like Overture and explore the results.

Ask folks who know. Ask your customers what they would search for using your blog, email, or a forum.

Use your website. If your site is already up and running you have a bit of an edge because, using your website statistics, explore what your visitors are searching for.


Which keywords work best?

Once you have a list of potential keywords, it’s time to tackle the science portion of keyword optimization. It’s important to make sure your keywords are quality ones. Keywords that will generate not only a good page ranking, they will also send tons of traffic to your website.

Here are a few statistics to investigate when determining your ideal researching keywords and keyword phrases.

Predicted traffic/popularity. Most keyword tools will tell you how often a keyword was searched for in the previous month. While this number isn’t a guarantee, the numbers help you compare keywords for popularity. For example, the popularity of the keyword phrase

Pet clothes might be 2600 searches last month
Dog clothes might have 9400 searches last month
Dog sweater might have 3300 searches.

Now you can see that ‘dog clothes’ was the most popular keyword and therefore it might generate the strongest results for your website.

Conversion rate. This is the number that you will likely find most helpful. The conversion rate tells you that search for your potential keyword actually take action when they reach your site. This action might be buying something, clicking on an ad, or subscribing to a mailing list.

Competition. Search engine optimization is in large part a competition. You want your page to rank higher than your competitions. This means, you will want to know who your competition is for your chosen keyword or keywords.

Value per customer. The keyword value per customer is the amount of money spent by people that reached a site by searching for that keyword, divided by the total number of searches for that keyword, over a set period of time.

Now that you have a list of keywords you’re going to integrate into your website, how do you use them for the best results? One great way is in your content.