SEO Passion

There are plenty of free tools that can help give you ideas on keywords. They can tell you the most searched terms or how difficult a keyword is to optimise for etc. But you should also start with an analysis of your own products and services in order to fully understand your capabilities and potential.

Know your product

Assess your business to determine whether your products/services are widely known about. If you are operating in a niche, or emerging market, some level of education may be required. If people don’t know the terms of your business in order to search for you, some keyword manipulation has to be done to ensure you can make yourself visible. This may involve targeting closely related or themed keywords – the key will be keeping content relevant for the search engines and web users.

If your products or services can be localised i.e. an additional geographical search criteria is added to the search term in order to show results within the region of the user, it makes sense to add locations to your keywords. Similarly, if your products fluctuate in popularity according to season, the addition of seasonal descriptors is going to be advisable at these times.

Look at the competition

Spend some time assessing the competition. Enter a few search terms and have a nose around your competitor’s sites. Checking the keywords in urls and primary content will give you an idea of what they are optimising for and help you appreciate the level and angle of the competition. Apply learnings from trend analysis and keyword tools to add a clearer picture of what web users are most commonly searching for. Consider this in terms of your offering – are those competing in your arena big brands or small companies, are their websites large, polished and well established and how do you compare? A certain degree of honesty is required in adequately assessing your business. You need to determine whether you have the power at this particular point in time to target keywords that may be monopolised by stronger companies. Knowing your limitations will help you select more realistic keywords.

Assess user error

It sounds very simple but when you are considering your keywords you should remember to consider popular misspellings of words. Keyword tools can help you assess this by showing the volume of searches performed on similar or misspelt words close to your own. It is good practice to optimize for these words as well as your key term.

Measure your success

Importantly, once you have assessed and selected the most appropriate keywords for your site and optimised for them, you should still monitor the above factors. Competition is constantly changing and fads, latest news and seasons will always affect searches. As your site grows and the market changes you will need to tinker with your keywords and keyphrases (known as keyword stemming) and even change them to ensure you stay relevant and effective within your marketplace as time goes on.
Search for free keyword research tools.

Find out more about effectively optimizing your page using your selected keywords in our On-page section.