SEO Elements - Choosing Keywords & Keyphrases

Choosing keywords and keyphrases is just one small element amongst several activities that make up SEO. However, it is arguably the most important activity the optimiser will do. This article discusses why the choice of keywords and key phrases is so important to any webmaster and gives some practical advice on how to select them.

Critical Nature of Keyword Choice

Choosing the wrong keywords will result in low visitor numbers, high bounce rates and poor conversion rates. The activities associated with changing your targeted keywords after a website is established can be damaging to your rankings in the short term and can also result in wasted optimisation effort.

Your websites page names, urls and domain name should reflect the choices you make and changing these after the site has been up and running can be very time consuming and done incorrectly will result in broken links which can also be damaging to rankings, bounces and conversions.

These are the main reasons why getting it right first time round is so important.

Methods For Choosing Keywords

There are a number of different methods for choosing keywords. The first place to start is to identify the products or services offered by your company or organisation. For example, an insurance broker may offer a variety of different types of insurance. They may offer home insurance, motor insurance and travel insurance. So the obvious terms are "home insurance", "motor insurance" and "travel insurance". However, optimising a new website for these words may prove fruitless owing to the level of competition.

Longtail Phrases

Most keywords are either nouns or verbs. Preceding the noun or verb with an adjective is a good way of coming up with longtail phrases. For example, "motor insurance" might become "affordable motor insurance", "low cost motor insurance" or "quality motor insurance". These longtail key phrases can be useful if you are having trouble getting onto the first couple of pages. Remember though that these choices may have less competition but also will have significantly lower volumes.

Niches

Most business people recognise that there are only three generic marketing strategies that can be followed by any business. These are "low cost strategy", "value added strategy" or "niche strategy". Discussion of these strategies is outside the scope of this article but I'm sure you can see the connection between a company's marketing strategy and the key words it should target. The longtail examples above link to the first two strategies of low cost and value added.

However, your company or organisation may differentiate itself from it's competitors by specialising into a particular niche. The insurance broker in my example may specialise in motor insurance for kit cars. In which case an option would be "kit car insurance". These niches are always likely to have less competition than more general phrases.

Measuring Competitiveness of Key Phrases

The more competitive a key word/s is the harder it will be to appear at the top of SERPs. The top results for competitive words will contain websites that have strong domain strength. They are likely to be long established, have quality content and many backlinks pointing to them. If you can get to the top of the rankings for general key words then the volumes of visitors your site will receive will be huge but it will be hard to achieve and take time you may not have.

In order to choose your keywords you need some way of comparing them with a view to understanding how likely they are to be successful for you. A simple way is to use a combination of the Google Keyword Tool and Google’s results. List out all your potential keywords or phrases. Enter each one into Google and note down the total number of results shown in the top right hand corner of the page. It will say “1-10 of about x for [phrase]. It’s the ‘x’ you want to note down.

Now enter each of your phrases into the Google Keyword Tool and note down the ‘Approx Avg Search Volume’ it shows you.

Work out what average volume is expressed as a percentage of total results. i.e.

% = (Approx Avg Search Volume/Total Results) * 100

The higher the percentage the easier it will be for you to obtain a high ranking for the key phrase. In my experience anything above about 20% is relatively easy to optimise for but it is just a guide. The important thing is comparing the phrases you have already identified, like for like.

Keyword Analysis Tools

There are a variety of tools out there for comparing keywords and often use KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index). Some of these tools are good and well worth experimenting with. If you find a good one and use it consistently it will be a very useful tool for you.

Remember that choosing your keywords is just one small yet very important part of SEO. Keep your primary key words in mind when choosing your page names, headings, image names, internal links, backlinks and throughout your optimisation activities.