It’s impossible to understate the importance of SEO for any business. Having an online presence is essential nowadays, and SEO is integral to finding your online presence.
There’s a lot that goes into search engine optimization, but keyword selection and optimization is certainly one of the most important elements. We’re going to talk a little bit about how to choose an SEO focus keyword that you’ll actually have success with.
Choosing an SEO Focus Keyword
We’ll start out by giving a brief overview of why keywords are so important in SEO.
When a user goes into a search engine and tries to find information, the selection of words they type into the search bar is their keyword. Keywords can be long tail or short tail, meaning that they can be a single word or a string of words that form a phrase.
The search engine then runs that keyword choice against all of the sites that it has in its database, using roughly 200 factors to find the sites that are most relevant. The most relevant sites are those that appear on the first and second pages of the results pages.
One of the primary things that search engines check for is that sites have content with the specific words that the user has searched. Either that or the site has words that are very similar to the searched terms.
How to Select the Right Keyword
The job of selecting keywords to optimize for is sort of a challenging one. The key is understanding what your users are searching for and adapting your content to fit your users’ needs.
This, unfortunately, means that you will have to create content regularly and optimize that content to the keywords that are popular in your niche. Actually knowing what words are popular, though, requires that you do research on keyword volume in your niche, your area, and your target demographic.
There are a number of keyword research sites that you can use to gather relevant information on these terms. These sites can actually reveal a lot of information about the terms being searched, who is searching for them, what area those people are in, and how much competition you’ll have when ranking for them.
Selecting Among Popular Keywords
Another issue arises once you see the popular keywords: if popular keywords are those that other sites are optimizing for as well, how do you get the chance to rank against already popular sites?
The key is finding keywords that are seeing some activity but aren’t seeing a lot of competition. This is typically found in more specific, long tail keywords.
The word “new car” is probably already heavily optimized for by sites like Ford and Toyota. “New car in the Burnsville area with no money down” is a keyword that will likely have low competition.
Now it’s time to get out there and find your keyword!
Need to Know More About SEO?
Finding an SEO focus keyword is just the beginning of a successful SEO platform. There are a number of elements that work together in creating a popular site.
Visit our site to learn more about how SEO works and what you can start doing to optimize!
