One of the most important tactics in terms of SEO is keyword research. Keyword research should start by focusing on all the important target markets the company does business in, including the ones that are considered local markets, make a priority of the niches the company does business in and start defining all the important keywords in those niches. The next step would be to research each one of those niches for keywords that can be used. The company’s marketing and branding initiatives need to be taken into consideration and this is a process that needs to happen before anything else happens.
Many SEO strategies make the mistake of only using the most searched keywords. Although you should have a strategy in place targeting those keywords as a long range initiative, there are literally thousands of key-phrase combinations that bear much less competition and therefore are much easier to rank on and start bringing more traffic to the website in a more immediate fashion.
These are what I call the low hanging fruit and most of the times, these types of keywords can be had in a lot less time than the usual hyper competitive ones. That brings a sense of accomplishment to the SEO team, it also makes the whole process more encouraging because you can see what worked for certain types of keywords and it helps to create a series of tactical strategies that can help you rank for the different types of keywords by a degree of difficulty.
For example, you may develop a strategy for keywords that have 300.000 to 1.000.000 competitors. Another completely different (more thorough) strategy for keywords with 1 million plus up to 4 million and another altogether for 4 million plus. What you will end up finding is a huge number of keywords that have less than 300 000 competing websites and that you can rank with little effort and that bring very targeted traffic to the website.
I usually start my campaigns by dividing the keywords in groups, that is, once I have done a very extensive and through keyword research and I have hundreds, sometimes thousands of keywords all organized in a spreadsheet, then I will work on separating my keywords using several different methods such as keywords with less than 100000 competing and more than x searches per day, and so on and so forth, keywords that can be attached to a locality ex: denver lawyer or colorado real estate, find the competition on those as well, separate them into different spreadsheets and so on. That way, I end up with a very comprehensive map of what my best bets are for ranking faster, how much traffic those can bring to my site, what are my hardest targets, etc.
Now I can devise different strategies for my different groups of keywords and go to work on that. Sounds like a lot of work but there is software out there that makes the process pretty simple. Wordtracker is one of them but I use a combination of programs myself to make the job easier. The fact is, the more time you put on doing a good and thorough keyword research, the better you will do when actually get to the SEO job itself and how you go about doing that.
For more information on my Search Engine Optimization Strategies, visit my website, Denver SEO Specialist.
Marcio Dias is an accomplish website architect as he likes to call himself. He has taken many websites from virtual (literally) obscurity to hundreds of thousands of visitors and dollars in sales. He specializes in helping business owners in every industry to create and execute successful marketing plans that make the most of the latest technologies such as web 2.0, forums, blogs and much more. Marcio is an SEO expert and can also put your site in the first page of Google for all your important search terms and keywords.
For more information, visit Marcio at his Denver Web Marketing and Denver SEO Hub, L1Marketing.com
