Keyword Strategy

When setting up an SEO campaign, keyword research and keyword choice should be at the centre of your focus. It’s the keywords that everything centres around, and the choice of what to aim at will ultimately depict the success and subsequent traffic levels of any search engine marketing. Every sector in any business will have hundreds of potential keywords and phrase variations that could be chosen, all with varying levels of search traffic and competition. Therefore, the biggest decision to make is whether to aim for high traffic with high competition or go for less competitive phrases and sacrifice potential traffic volumes.

High Traffic/High Competition

Going for keywords with high competition and high traffic levels is definitely a long term approach for any website. If the website and domain are both new, this can sometimes be unrealistic however services such as Google Adwords can be used effectively to launch into a competitive market should the budget allow this. The difficulty with highly competitive keywords is that so many website will be trying to be seen for these particular search results. Quite often, the websites at the top will have been around for a long time, and as a result will probably have very high domain authority. To get anywhere near them will take considerable effort and time. However, if you can achieve good results for competitive keywords, the results are almost certain to bring you a high amount of very good traffic. If you have a website that has been around for a number of years and already has lots of regular high quality links coming in, your chances are improved somewhat and going for high traffic keywords is definitely more of a realistic approach. This doesn’t mean the work is already done, it just means you have a better base from which to start.

Less Competitive Keywords

This option is a lot more popular, especially for brand new websites and also for SEO projects where the budget may be limited. Many websites survive quite nicely on picking up traffic from several smaller keywords where their pages have a strong chance of coming up high in the listings. The other benefit to this is that often the less competitive keywords represent a ‘niche’ and therefore the traffic that they generate can be a lot more focused and likely to convert into sales or new leads. Another very popular option within the less competitive keywords is to focus in on geographical areas. Good results using Google Maps can be relatively easy to achieve to go alongside a good result in the organic listings below. If you operate an online shop, you will probably find that you can pick up a substantial amount of traffic from people searching for specific items. For this reason it is really important that every product page is optimised towards the appropriate keyword or product title.

To summarise, it’s really important when making this decision to be realistic about the chances of success. You need to ask yourself about your budget and time and try to weigh up what’s best for your particular circumstance.