Setting You Up to Compete
Steps to Defining Your Keywords to Success
So how do you win? That may be an easy question, but the answer isn't so easy. However, we'll not only answer that question, we'll show you the basics on how to win.
*NOTE: This article only covers the building of the keyword list. There is still a ton of work to build out the champions, supporting articles, content strategy, link building, etc. Those are topics covered in other articles, or you can request a free consultation with one of our SEO experts read more on our SEO services.
Step 1
- Gather Your Basic Thoughts
You and your team know better than anyone, who your company is, what your strengths are and what you think your products and services are that you're marketing. Gather those core ideas and come up with the basic keyword terms or phrases that you think represent how you'd market those today. We have to start somewhere. It may even be the keywords that you've been using and losing with, and you want to find out how to improve upon them. Great, build that starting list.
Step 2
So now that you've got your list. Let's see how likely you are to "win" with those keywords. Launch your Adwords console. If you don't do any PPC, then you can create a free Adwords account. Go to Google and type, "keyword planner tool" and find the Google Adwords link. Create an account. Once you're into Adwords, in the top-right navigation, you'll see "TOOLS & SETTINGS." Click that option. The drop-down menu, far-left, under PLANNING, click on "Keyword Planner." Select "Discover new keywords" and paste in your first key word term or phrase.
Step 3
- Analyzing Your Keyword Results
In the graphic above, I pasted in a search term "manufacturing medical devices." The resulting page gives me everything I need to know to find the keywords I can win. However, that doesn't mean that my landing pages, content, champions, supporting articles are optimized for the keywords I will select. The first bit of good news with my search is that there are 1,600 searches each month in Google that type in that keyword and it looks like consistent search volume month to month, with Medium competition. So if I really want to win at that keyword, with medium competition, I probably can. However, if it was High competition, then I probably couldn't. So next, I look at the Competition column. I may even click the word Competition (column heading) twice to sort the results in descending order, which will bring all of the keyword variations of my keyword with low competition to the top. Now I can look at the Average Monthly Searches column and see how many people are searching for that less competitive keyword. I then pick the top 4 results with low competition that have the most searches and the closest match to my original keyword. Those are now my keyword and 3 variations that I will use for the strategy to "win" that keyword. Repeat this process for every keyword that you had in your original list until you have a spreadsheet with a bunch of rows (i.e. Original keyword, New Keyword, # searches, 1st variation, # searches....).
In case you're a little confused, if you look at the image above, it shows the Search Volume Trend (blue-red bar chart), which shows the average number of searches each month for my keyword (total searches, and those from a mobile device in red), if it's trending up or down, or stable. Below that is the "keyword you provided" or my keyword I typed in, with the results that I'm analyzing to the right of my keyword. The next section down the page is titled, "keyword ideas." This is where the keyword planner shows us a ton of other keyword variations, similar to the one we entered, and it's associated monthly traffic and competition. In other words, if we can't win with our keyword, here are a bunch of other similar keywords that people are searching for every month, that you may be able to win with.