“We want to be on page one of Google!”

As I talk to business owners every day, this is a common statement. But the question that always follows is, “What search terms do you want to get found for?” Typically, the answer is, “We want to get found for ‘product [insert city name]’ or ‘[insert product brand and city name]’”

While it is certainly not a bad thing to be found for these keywords in your city, the real question should be, “What are people searching for related to what we sell.”

You can spend a lot of time and money optimizing your website for search terms that don’t matter because they get little traffic.

How to Pick Keywords

Choosing keywords is much like choosing sales targets. You want to find the low-hanging fruit that will give you the best results for the least amount of work.
In the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) we look for two things: Monthly Searches and Difficulty.

Monthly Searches

This is how many people are searching for specific keywords in your market. What we’ve found is that each market is different. When we do keyword searches we often discover that the terms we thought were important aren’t getting much traffic at all. Instead, other keywords are getting more attention. These are the ones that need to get our attention.

Difficulty

This is a measure on a scale of 1 to 100 of how many other companies are competing for that search term. Basically, this tells us how hard we are going to have to work to get placement.

Once you know the monthly searches and the difficulty you are in a position to make good decisions regarding your keyword strategy. You want to look for keywords that have a relatively high search volume and a low difficulty. If you choose a term that has a high volume and a high difficulty you know that it will take a lot more work to get placement.