Finding the right keywords to reflect your company’s services is often one of the trickiest aspects of an SEO campaign. At the same time it is key to achieving successful results. There are numerous ways you can approach this.
To start brainstorm a list of keyphrases that you think reflect your company. Research these through Google and establish if your competitors are using the similar phrases, take a sneaky look at their meta data. Your phrases need to reflect what your buyer will look for.
Below I will make suggestions of free simple tools I use every day for keyword suggestions.
- 1. Google Suggest – Annoying as I find it when searching myself, it gives users a reason to move away from a more generic phrase to a more specific refined version. It can sometimes give you some useful insights into other options you should consider.
- 2. Google Adwords – One of the best free tools, providing monthly searches based on averages over a 12 month period. It can also give you various other suggestions. It is important to note that if you are looking into organic optimisation to change the “match types” to “exact.
- note that if you are looking into organic optimisation to change the “match types” to “exact.
- 3. Google Insights – Will highlight seasonal trends and fluctuations, it will also highlight growing related areas. My only complaint is the statistics are not absolute, but it can help you prioritise your keyword strategy.
- 4. Feedback from your staff, they might just have one little golden nugget that clients ring up and ask about on a frequent basis.
- 5. PPC – Ok so technically I have lied a little as this is not free. But a small PPC campaign can sometimes really help you drill down into phrases that will work well organically for you.
In the grand scheme of things search volume is important, but more often than not the keyphrases with the largest search volume will be more generic phrases and not necessarily buying phrases. You need to find a combination of both phrases that will drive traffic to your site helping you establish brand reputation, and those little golden nugget phrases that are going to convert into sales for your company. Once your campaign is underway you can start to review your Google analytics data to begin to fine tune your phrases for the ones proven to work best for your business.