Before getting into the intricacies of how to rank well in the search engines, we need to first discuss what we want to target. First a quick example, our family’s commercial real estate website. We started by targeting terms like “commercial real estate” and “commercial property” along with our trade areas of “Roswell,” “Alpharetta,” and “North Fulton”. We quickly ranked #1 in Google, MSN, and Yahoo for the terms “North Fulton Commercial” and others similar. Great, right? Nope, because nobody was typing the search term “North Fulton commercial property” into the search boxes!
Target Keywords that will generate Traffic
But how? Below you’ll find some tools to check search volume for a list of keywords, that way you won’t go into you’re DIY SEO campaign blindly.
Start by making a list of possible keywords for your business, and don’t forget – if your business has anything to do with a geographic area, make sure to include the place names.
For example, if I were running a guide outfit for bonefish in the Florida keys, my list might look like this:
- Fishing
- Bonefish
- Tarpon
- Permit
- Florida Keys
- Key Largo
- Islamorada
- Upper Keys
- Flats Fishing
- Backcountry Fishing
- Charters
- Guides
Great, now we have our keyword list, here’s what to do with it.
Google Keywords Tool
Log onto the Google Adwords Tool, and enter in one of your keyword phrases.
Feel free to experiment with the columns list, showing search trends, cost per click, but it all comes down to the “Search Volume” and “Advertiser Competition” columns. Anything with no data under the search volume column, put a big red line through it.
Pay special attention to terms or phrases that have a relatively high search volume, and low advertiser competition. These are the terms you can rank well with easily, and have high search volume for traffic generation.
Notice the difference between the term highlighted in red and the ones in green.
*Please note, I’m not saying you should disregard highly competitive keywords, we’ll focus on them once we have the DIY SEO techniques down. Do disregard keywords that have little or no search data, you’ll be wasting time that could go into better keywords.
