What are Keywords?

Firstly let's consider what keywords are. Put simply they are the words or phrases that people put into a search engine when they search. The results that they get back are the ones the search engine believes are the most relevant to the chosen word or phrase.

Checking Number of Searches

When you are choosing your keywords one of the most important thing to know is how many searches there are for a keyword. There are a lot of useful tools, many of which are free that you can find on the internet that will help you with this. It is absolutely vital that you know this because what is the point in appearing at the top of the search engines for a phrase that no one searches for. So once you have an idea of the keywords you want to use you can find out how many searches there are for each of them to help you reduce your list and only include those with a large number of searches.

Checking the competition

Once you know how many searches there are for your keywords you also need to know how many results there are for each one. If you have a keyword that has a medium number of searches but a very high competition level it might have less value than those keywords that have less competition. It is really important to check this as words with very high competition as much harder to get to the top for and will take a lot longer so the search volume needs to be high enough to warrant the effort.

Commercial Intent of Keywords

One of the other things you need to analyse is the commercial intent of each of the keywords. If you are looking to sell to customers then you need to make sure that you are targeting buyers. There are a lot of keywords out there that people use just to find information on a certain topic and not for buying. Those are the ones you should be avoiding. One way to tell is to look at the top 10 results in a search engine if there is only one commercial site and the rest are information then it is not a commercial keyword. However if there are 9 commercial sites in the top 10 then your chances will be a lot better there.

Long Tail Keywords

These are basically search terms that include 3 or more words. These are phrases you should look at very closely as they are usually the ones used by people looking to buy. In addition to that the more general keywords are usually dominated by the big brands and will be a lot harder to break into.

As you can see from the above selecting the keywords to optimise your website for is not a simple thing. It is important to do the proper research to ensure you are going in the right direction. Without this research you could waste a lot of time and money on SEO with very little effect.