The right keywords can make or break an entire internet marketing campaign. Ranking for the right words can be a challenge, so this is an easy step-by-step guide to choosing the right keywords.
1.) Who is your target market? Brainstorming 101
Who are you trying to reach with your campaign? Is it local, national or worldwide? This is a huge step to choosing the right keywords as ranking for local terms like “dallas web designer ” is much easier to rank than just “web designer.” Here are more questions to ask:
What are your target market demographics?
Where would they “hang out” on the internet?
How are they likely to find your offer?
A great tool to do this would be Google Insights For Search
It allows you to enter different terms and search the different parts of the world where people search for that term. For example say you are wondering if more people search for “web designer” or “website designer” you can do a search and these are the results:
Under “search terms” you would type in your keywords that you are thinking about comparing. Notice that you can filter by state and different times for example from 2008 to 2011. Google insights goes back as 2004 so you can see the trend and change over time.
As you can see, more people search for web designer than they search for website designer, so this could be a good indication of what to use on your page as a keyword. Another really cool Google insights feature is that it gives you the top 10 states that are looking for that keyword. So if you would really like to maximize your efforts you could place ads on craigslist on those top 10 states or write SEO articles with the name of the city or state on the title.
A second tool that is available by Google is the Google Adwords External Keyword Tool
This tool is awesome because it allows you to determine how much competition you have for your specific keyword and the amount of local or global monthly searches. This tool will give you many more keywords that are related to the keyword that you typed in originally. Generally it is much easier to rank for long-tail keywords like ” web designer in dallas texas.”
A third tool is google itself! Go to Google.com
Type the following in the search term: allintitle: web designer in dallas texas at that point you will see how many pages are optimized to rank for that particular term. This single thing can help you determine how many other people are trying to outrank you. Also do a search for “web designer in dallas texas” and that will give you the exact match of people that have that on their page title.
Keyword research can be daunting, but if you want to rank high in google, it makes sense to use google to do your research. The goal is to find a high number of searches with a low number allintitle: pages. Those will be the best keywords and the easier ones to rank for.