What are the right keywords for an SEO campaign?

That is the million dollar question and the answer is as much a business strategy as an SEO one.

It would be very ambitious to target top level keywords for your business – for instance if you are a business advisor, you will find the keywords ‘business advisor’ very hard indeed to do well in.  So what keywords do you target? To find that answer, you have to take a look at your business and your expertise – perhaps the type of clients you attract and the type of clients you want.

For instance, if you spent the early part of your working career in the automotive industry and your contacts and clients are in that industry, should you add the keyword automotive to the mix? Or do you think those clients are a pain in the ass and your passion is to help people starting a hairdressing salon – well that is a good starting point, but perhaps you should first do an analysis of the demand in that sector….

Next, you have to research your chosen keywords to discover if anybody is even searching it – It would be an absolute disaster to throw thousands of dollars at this and months of your time only to find you are number 1 in Google and the traffic to your website has not increased at all. This is where you probably should enlist the help of a good SEO company. But beware, there are many around who will be happy to rank you in non-performing keywords, because competition is much lighter there and it is easy to achieve results.

Here it is always better to test your chosen keywords for performance and some others too, with a Pay Per Click campaign with a good Adwords management team. Here you will find some surprises – for instance, who would have thought that the keywords with the highest conversion rate for a fence manufacturer and installation company would be ‘fencing materials’ -It seems that many people searching for fencing materials decide they would rather have an installed fence when they begin to search.

You have no way of knowing that without doing an Adwords or PPC campaign, so if you don’t test the keywords first, but simply launch into a lengthy SEO campaign, you could miss your best business opportunity.

Selecting the right keywords for your SEO campaign is not something you do with an automated program. It is also not something you simply leave to your “SEO guru”. The inquiries and ultimately clients you attract in the future will be largely due to the keywords you choose now.

Choose Carefully