SEO is a sure bet in generating qualified engaged traffic to your website. When you target the right keywords and geographic area SEO will provide you with the best ROI over time compared to other online marketing techniques. If you have become familiar with SEO methods, you have already heard of link building and on page optimization. These techniques are very important to your success in Google Ranking. However, before you dive into hours and hours of time link building and writing and developing content it is very important to do research.
Research is more than just thinking about keywords that are associated with your business. The first step is to brainstorm to identify important keywords. Then identify the search traffic for keywords that are relevant. I use Google's Keyword Tool to identify search terms using the [exact phrase] search. I then choose keywords based on search traffic, conversion rate of the landing pages, closing ratio of leads, and competition. These are all important factors when deciding a keyword to target. After all, you do not need to target a search term with 100,000 monthly local visits when you only need 20 new leads per month. You are better off targeting a long tail keyword that generates less search but higher conversion.
After you have identified the keywords that you might want to target you should perform searches across these terms to see if there is a lot of competition for these keywords. I use http://www.SEOBook.com to provide me with relevant information and data of websites targeting each keyword. I then create an excel spreadsheet with 3 columns. The first column is for the keyword or phrase, the second column is for the search traffic, and the third column is for the average PageRank of the websites appearing on the 1st page of Google SERP. Once you have this information laid out, you can make an educated decision on which keywords that you are going to target. There are many other data points that I like to utilize. Some of these data points include how much traffic goes to the top sites in the search, how many websites are link building using anchor text for these keywords, are there government or high profile sites appearing under these search terms, does a Google Maps section appear under the search, and how long will it take me to appear on the 1st page of this search.
