How To Choose Keywords For Your Website That Gets Leads

How To Choose Keywords

Pictures Are Worth A Thousand Words, But The Right Keywords Are Worth More

How to choose keywords has long since been a standing argument with a lot of debate, opinions, and angles. Let's start with the basics, in hopes that we can shed some light on how to choose keywords. There are two different ways to go about solving the same issue. Either you already have a website that you are trying to optimize with keywords, or you are starting fresh and want to choose the best keywords for your content. Two very different issues, however the solution for both is quite similar.

We need to take a step back and determine the pillars of your business and separate them into three to five core market verticals. Websites are like a book, and need to be user/reader friendly, along with having a very easy click through that encourages visitor engagement. So, question number one is do you have your three to five market verticals identified and established? Once you have established your market verticals, my recommendation is always going to point to Google Adwords Keywords Tool. There are many articles on the internet that would contradict this recommendation, however I would pose this simple question to you after making the following statement regarding global search on the internet. Google represents approximately 83% of all searches globally, so does it make sense to cater to the 17% who use other search engines or try and capture the 83% target market of Google?

Google AdWords Keywords Tool

How to choose keywords through the keywords tool on Google can be a bit confusing to start. We could create a tutorial on how to do this, however this is knowledge our clients pay us for, and we learned the hard way, through endless hours of educating ourselves. We aren't meaning to sound selfish, but this is a free tool for you to use. The keywords tool will allow you to generate an excel spreadsheet of different keywords, along with suggesting similar keywords to your search, giving you recommendations and competitive research regarding your market verticals. The first question I always receive from clients regarding this report is "What does this mean?".

My recommendations regarding using this tool and how to choose keywords isn't precise, rather choose what makes sense for your company, your market verticals, and most importantly your pocketbook; should you choose to create an Adwords Campaign. Keep in mind that you most likely have potential competitors with deep pockets, so choosing keywords that they aren't competing for may be your best solution.

Broad Keywords versus Long Tail Search

Using one of our market verticals as the example "inbound marketing", we find ourselves in the predicament described above. We can use the keyword "inbound marketing", however we will be competing with billion dollar companies for the same customer. Inbound Marketing is a broad keyword, whereas "Inbound Marketing Companies in Minnesota" would be a long tail search. It's pretty straight forward. The billion dollar companies will be operating in the broad keyword arena, along with their pocket books, however they leave the scraps to the smaller companies like Kpahi. Thank you. We appreciate all of the "scraps" we can get. If we choose the long tail keyword of "Inbound Marketing Companies in Minnesota", we need to provide content which relates to the keyword we have chosen. While content creation will be much easier for "Inbound Marketing", we will have to provide gobs of content to gain ranking among the field of competition. My recommendation to gain traction more quickly would be to use a hybrid mixture of both long tail and broad keywords in your content to help build your organic search rankings.

(Note: Be careful to not use keyword stuffing in your content, as this could get you sandboxed by Google. Your keyword density should hover around 1% per page for the specified keyword, while maintaining at least a 70% Flesch Reading Test for easy reading. If you want to learn more about this, please reach out to us for an explanation.)

Google AdWords Competition Ranking

Google provides a category labeled "Competition" in the excel file you will create. This column designates how tough the market is regarding cost and people using that specific keyword. How to choose keywords starts with realizing your ability to compete. I would recommend that you start with a competition rating of .7 or below on a scale of 0-1. The higher the number, the more difficult it will be to rank with that specific keyword. Once you are gaining traction with your content, you can add tougher competitive keywords to existing content, throwing your hat into the ring with the bigger companies to compete in their side of the arena. An example of this is my finishing our content page for Google Adwords for our site, which will have a link from this article to the page internally to build page authority through Moz. We are continuously building content to support our content and keywords to ensure we are gaining traction in every area of search engine visibility.

Google AdWords Suggested Bid

This is a very important aspect of how to choose keywords from your excel report. The suggested bid is how much you should expect to pay for every single click to your website on a pay per click campaign. The deceiving portion of this would be that it doesn't take into consideration a total expected cost per client, or your customer acquisition cost. If we take an $8.36 suggested bid and multiply it by 5 (Assuming 20% conversion, which is quite generous), we can safely assume (if the content is lucrative and product is in line with the market) that the average customer will cost no less than $41.80 to get the conversion. The higher the suggested bid, the higher your customer acquisition costs will be. There are more cost effective ways to obtain exposure and capture with Google, however a hybrid campaign can be a bit tricky, causing companies like Kpahi to exist, as that is one of our market verticals.

How to Choose Keywords Conclusion

I know this is just a taste of how to choose keywords. I could talk about this all day. As much as some would enjoy reading more about this subject, our customers expect results. That being said, duty calls. If you have any questions regarding keywords, or would like a free report from us, drop us a line or give us a call. We enjoy nerding it up about the internet of things and content that gets leads.