It All Starts with the Keywords

This week, I have taken on a couple of new clients. It made me think of how important the keywords are to any SEO project.

The most common thing I see is someone thinking a keyword will work, when it won't. Guilty of this one myself--I often think people will search on something specific when they in fact, don't. This is why you should try to limit your guessing in choosing your targeted keywords.

Start With a List

A business owner, or a freelance SEO writer on the job needs to free-associate some terms with the way they want the business to be perceived. List them out--that's what whiteboards and legal pads are for. Think of what you want the website to do, what the company offers--simple, basic ideas or more specific ones. Write them out and don't edit them. Do as many as you can.

In my experience, the initial list you develop here is seldom the list of keywords you will actually target in SEO.

Not to say you can't target them, of course...and you usually do. But the list a business owner and another web professional creates, and the list a street-level web user creates may not line up. They will usually intersect through obvious keywords, but many business owners are surprised to see the really odd things people type in an engine to find them.

There is often a gap between how intimately someone on the inside considers the business, and how a potential web customer sees them, or more accurately, searches for someone like them.

An SEO copywriter steps in here, to help bridge this gap.

Use the Tools

Take the brainstorming list, and run it through some really basic keyword analysis.

There are some great free tools to use to get a look at search volumes for specific keywords in various engines. Some even offered by the engines themselves. I suggest to try a couple out to see which one you like. I use more than one usually...simply because they all offer something different, and no one of them is perfect. I also like to gather as much data as I can before making a decision on keywords.

So get a few tools you like to use. Plunk in your keywords, and a good tool will not only show you the search volume on that specific term, it will list related ones. This helps you see things clearly from a user's perspective. Don't think of a keyword report like this as the Bible, or something carved in stone...try to see it as a direction.

I usually export out these lists in full, into Excel. Then I manually cull the lists, tossing out duds, and non-target worthy results. I sort the data by search volume, and the list starts to take shape. I combine the best words from the initial brainstorming list (because these are important to the business) with keywords from the analysis (because these are important to the web users) and I am able to map out a clear strategy where everybody wins.

Everything I do, depends on this list. I need to create pages that answer needs...a user's and my client's. I depend 100% on the research and data behind the keywords that make this all click together in our favor.

Take the time to really understand the keywords and search habits of your audience. Don't guess, dig deeper. The results are always worth it.