For those of you out there doing DYI SEO, or serving in web content contributor roles at your organization, you probably often struggle with choosing which keyword(s) to optimize your page(s) for. To be clear, I’m referring to the situations in which your page’s topic may be referred to in several different ways. To use a few examples from recent conversation/consultation: pc repair vs. computer repair, or millennial keynote speaker vs. gen y keynote speaker, or sports medicine expert vs. sports medicine specialist. When narrowing down the core term for which you’re optimizing and thereby, what keyword you’re seeking to rank for, there are a few ways to make sure your decision is a wise and informed one:

Define Your Target Audience and Goals

If you operate a local and/or small business, let’s say a pc repair shop, ranking on the first page of Google results for “pc repair” probably isn’t what you want to be aiming for. Will you generate targeted interest from that ranking? Probably not, and because of that, you also probably wouldn’t remain on the first page of results for very long even if you did get there.

If you’re using your website as a way to generate leads in any form or fashion, you need to define your audience before you can target it. In the example above, if the PC repair company is serving the Easton/Lehigh Valley, PA area, which my awesome friend’s, Ryan Critchett does, then it’s better to optimize for terms around local searches. In other words, Ryan will generate business from ranking for computer repair bethlehem, pa, whereas he is not seeking to repair computers on a national level, so optimizing for the general “PC repair” term is not in his best interest. (Note in the linked example that Ryan has created landing pages for each of his local target markets, a smart move to ensures he ranks for people searching across a variety of areas in his region)

Do Keyword Volume Research

Once you’ve defined your target audience and it’s time to choose between this or that keyword, the first step is to research how people are searching. One of the easiest ways to do this is by using Google’s free Keyword Tool. If you’re already using Google AdWords, you can access it by clicking on Reporting and Tools in the top nav menu, and choosing Keyword Tool. For those of you who aren’t using AdWords, you too can use the Google Keyword Tool. You can put as many variations of your keyword in the box (for step by step instructions, check out my post on using the Google Keyword Tool), and I recommend checking the box that says, “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms.” Google will throw back some suggestions and terms it thinks are related that may or may not shed some light for you on how people are searching. To go back to an example from above, if you put just title search and title examination in that box, you’ll see that 165,000 people are searching in the U.S. per month for title search, whereas 1,900 are searching for title examination.

Taking a hint from the step 1 and determining your goals, you can infer from this data and pattern that if you’re company is providing title searches in Atlanta, you’d want to optimize around more regional metro area terms. If you were a large national title firm with a variety of franchise locations, you would first want to define your goals (i.e. is each location maintaining a website for which you’re wanting to rank? Is your branding initiative a global one that instead funnels potential clients through one site?). If your goals are to funnel leads through one overarching brand website, you’ll want to optimize for the more general terms, and pick the ones that more people ae using.

DISCLAIMER – competition is a piece you should also consider before picking between this or that keyword. There are situations in which you’ll be picking between this or that and will want to choose the less searched for word, so read on…

Evaluate Your Competition

Whether the product or service you’re offering appeals to a niche of a few thousand, or a niche of millions, you must evaluate what your competition is doing from an SEO standpoint. To go back to the pc repair example, pc repair and computer repair are searched for with fairly similar frequency. So in Ryan’s case, if his main local competitor in the computer repair market had an established site and was choosing to optimize for terms like computer repair Lehigh Valley and computer repair easton, Ryan would probably want to opt to optimize for pc repair Lehigh Valley, and pc repair easton, so he can immediately see improvements in search results without havig to compete. And because the volume is comparable, there is no opportunity cost of choosing pc repair as his core term. Should he decide he later wants to rank for computer repair, he will have a foundation of content around a very close derivative term (pc repair) that will make that process a faster and easier one.

Every organization and every SEO strategy is unique. Those differentiators are what will determine what else you add to this list, but these three steps are critical when it comes to keyword selection. Do you have others? What else do you do before deciding between this or that keyword?

Over 90% of site visitors (click-throughs) from search engine results pages come from the first page of results. So how do you get there? How do you place competitively for the terms most important to your organization? The goal of this blog is to help those involved in web content creation to achieve improvement in competitive search rankings via Search Engine Optimization (SEO). While Google keeps the totality of its algorithm tightly under wraps, we will stay on top of information released from Google and other search engines to continue to evaluate which factors are most affecting search engine rankings.

For our first blog post, we will focus on how you should select the keywords for which to optimize your site content. Keep in mind that the best attitude to take when approaching search engine optimization is– if it helps your end user find what they’re looking for, you’re doing something right. Overwhelming numbers of links and keywords used repeatedly are not helpful to the average user. Use your keywords and the other SEO practices we suggest here with moderation and where it makes sense to do so.

Step 1 – Evaluate Keyword Density

Evaluating site keyword density is an important first step in the SEO process. The saturation of particular keywords in your website demonstrates your website’s theme and purpose to search engines, such as Google. To evaluate what Google is already interpreting as your theme, there are plenty of free keyword tools out there that will allow you to evaluate your density in usage. Using these keywords in relevant moderation is equally as important as using them frequently and where it makes sense. The general rule of thumb is that keywords used frequently across your site should make up approximately 3% of your web content for a 500 word article. In this example, you would repeat the keyword (or a derivative, close related term) no more than 15 times in one article.

Step 2 – Evaluate Competitor Keywords

After you’ve identified which keywords you’re using most frequently in your site content, it’s time to evaluate the usage, density, and market saturation of words used by your competitors. Using Google Analytics and Google’s Keyword Tool to accomplish this is especially helpful. This tool will find derivative keywords of the terms your content is already using, and will make suggestions for additional keywords to use. The tool also displays the market usage of these terms, or in other words, how many competitive organizations are using these terms in their site and ad content. For example, let’s say you sell vintage action hero figurines. While terms such as “vintage toys” and “action figures” are relevant to your organization, they are also highly used around the Web and will be difficult terms for which to improve search rankings immediately. However, if you begin optimizing your content for a more specific set of niche keywords that are more specific to your organization and less frequently used by competition, seeing nearly immediate improvement in rankings for these terms is fairly easy. Over time, your rank for more general derivative keywords will improve as well.

Step 3 – Begin Optimizing and Tweaking Web Content

Use the steps above to help you refine your web content. After eliminating general terms and replacing them with your more specific subset of keywords, you’re ready for the next step– building relevancy and correlation in your web content.