Three Tips to Get at Your Site’s Best SEO Keywords

The foundation for effective search engine optimization (SEO) is choosing the right keywords.  Optimize your Website and landing pages with the wrong keywords and you’ll see little, if any, traffic to your site.

Choose the right keywords, however, and traffic will soar.

The problem many companies make when optimizing a Website is choosing keywords they think their customers are using – versus the keywords people are actually using in their searches.

In other words, marketers and business owners make keyword decisions based on hunches, not data.

Fortunately, this is a very easy fix. To determine the best keywords, all you need is a keyword search tool, such as Google’s free Keyword Search Tool, as well as tools like our own SEO Module in the Yield Web Marketing Suite.

Tools like Google’s give you one piece of data you need to make important keyword decisions: they tell you how many people searched a specific keyword phrase for a given period of time. (Google even breaks the data out between “local” or US-based searches and global searches.)  Taken together with Yield’s SEO Module, you’ll discover what keywords your site is currently optimized for and what people (i.e., your customers) are actually using in their searches.

Using these tools is not enough however. Knowing how many people searched a given keyword phrase is good. Knowing which keywords are right for your company is better. How do you determine the right keywords? Follow these tips:

First: Specific is better – Many companies mistakenly believe that their Website should have high rankings for generic keywords such as “HR Consultants.” The problem with generic keywords like this is that 1) it’s very hard to achieve high rankings and 2) they are so generic that even if you do achieve a high ranking, you’ll end up with lots of untargeted (re: poorly qualified) traffic.

When choosing keywords, think specific. If your company provides HR consulting, describe the type of consulting you provide and the industries you work with, i.e. manufacturing HR Consultants, financial HR consultants, technology HR consultants, etc.

The more specific your keywords, the more targeted your traffic will be and the higher your conversion rates.

Second: Word forms matter – Although you may call yourself “HR consultants,” your prospects may be searching for “HR consulting firms.”

Also pay attention to plurals of words i.e.: “HR consultants” versus “HR consultant.” The traffic for each word form can vary greatly.

Consider other words closely related to your main keyword. For example, in addition to “consultants” and “consulting,” research whether people are using “consultancy” “firms,” “companies,” “services,” and “consulting services.”

And most important, don’t forget to research the above word forms using the long version of “HR” – “human resources.” The difference in search numbers may surprise you.

Third: Go local – You may work with companies across the U.S. (or maybe even around the globe), but it pays to ensure your site is also optimized for local search.

This means that in addition to the keywords above, you’ll want to see if people are looking for HR companies in your city, region, and state.

For example, an HR company based in San Francisco would do a keyword search using “HR company San Francisco,” “HR company Silicon Valley,” “HR company SF Bay Area,” and “HR company California.”

When doing your research, keep track of the keywords that have zero or little traffic – you’ll want to remember why you’re optimizing the company site around given keywords.

Once you’ve developed a list of keywords, input them into an Excel spreadsheet and then sort them by search volume and alphabetically. Sorting by volume makes it easy to see which keywords generate the best traffic; sorting alphabetically makes it easy to see which keywords you’ve included in your search.

So: small plug for Yield Software… Knowing the best keywords around which to optimize your website is critical. Using our Yield Web Marketing Suite to manage your performance against those keywords helps you to achieve the best possible page rank for your keywords.  The system checks your website regularly against our library of SEO best practice to ensure there’s nothing going on to prevent you from achieving your highest possible rank in natural search results.  When the system identifies problems, it offers a clear explanation of the problem; a solution for fixing it; and even offers auto-fixes for many common issues that crop up.

You can learn more about our Yield Web Marketing Suite here.