One of the very first steps to building a search presence for your business, is the process commonly referred to as keyword discovery. Here are some basics about getting started with keyword discovery and one very commonly overlooked aspect to building keyword lists for your business.
The purpose to keyword discovery is to identify search phrases that your target audience might be using to find your business online. The terms may be branded (i.e. contain the name of your business or specific product or service brand names) or unbranded. Generally speaking, branded keywords will be a lot less competitive and your site is likely to rank very well for branded search terms without a lot of effort. On the other hand, unbranded search terms generally have much higher volume, but are also much more competitive requiring more advanced search engine optimization techniques.
The first step to discovering keywords that are likely to bring visitors to your site is brainstorming. I typically recommend opening up a spreadsheet document and just start adding words and phrases that you believe are relevant to your business. Remember, try to think like your target audience. If your target audience includes general lay consumers, keep in mind that these consumers may not be familiar with industry terms. On the other hand, if your audience is other businesses, perhaps including industry terms on your keyword lists makes more sense.
Once you have collected a pretty good list (anywhere from 50 to 100 unique search terms), it's time to prioritize these terms based on two primary factors: search volume and competition.
Search volume is the number of searches for a particular term in a given amount of time. As a general rule, the higher the search volume, the more competition there is likely to be for the particular term (although this is not always the case). Phrases that are very relevant to your business and have high search volume are excellent targets for optimization.
There are several tools available for identifying search volume. Google provides a free keyword tool. There are also premium tools for identifying volume. If you're just getting started, use Google's free tool until you require more comprehensive and reliable data.
In addition to search volume, you will also want to prioritize your search terms by competition. The greater the competition for a given search term, the more difficult it is likely to be to gain high search visibility for that term. As a general rule, terms of higher competition have higher search volume, but again, this is not always true. There are many ways to gauge competition for a search term. One of the most basic is to simply perform a search in Google and see how many results are returned. As a very general guideline, more results equals higher competition.
One area of keyphrase discovery that is often overlooked is the use of geographic modifiers. Geographic modifiers are keywords that have some geographic component. For example, city names, states, and countries, are all geographic modifiers. If your audience is likely to search for you business using geographic or regional terms, you will want to be sure to include those in your discovery brainstorming process.
Even if you have a national or global business, geographically modified search terms may make sense to target. Remember, the relevant inquiry isn't whether or not your business is unique to a particular area, the question is whether your target audience is likely to use such terms to search for your business online.
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