SEO 104: Multi Vendors, keyword research can still pay off big time
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Your keyword research can be, and should be pretty important. However, there has been a lot of debate regarding how its importance has decreased over the recent years.True, search engine algorithms are significantly smarter today than they were say a few years ago.
However, that does not mean that Keyword research has become redundant. Far from it. Keywords are still as important as ever and the only thing which has changed, is how their application has become much more intelligent.
What is a Keyword?
Okay, so let’s start from the very basics. If you already know all this, feel free to skip to the next paragraph. Keywords are basically the terms that are inserted into a search bar whenever a person is looking for a certain thing. So, in a way a Keyword is what connect the potential customer who searches for something, with your posts or articles. As is pretty obvious, they have a pretty major role to play in which searches yield which results.
And this is exactly where SEO comes in. You can optimize your website all you want, but the normal practice is to optimize it only for a few keywords and that too after performing due keyword research. It gets extremely difficult, and nigh to impossible, to optimize a particular post for more than a few.
Before Google started churning out gigantic updates aimed towards curtailing unscrupulous practices associated with keyword research, people would get away with literally stuffing their website content and articles with a bunch of keywords and have it jump to the top of the rankings.
No longer though. Google’s algorithms have gotten a lot, lot stronger and the company can now smell fishy activities from miles away. With that said today’s age and time call for liberal use of keyword/keywords — so that they actually add value to the content instead of detracting from it.
Keyword usage should be judicial and at the same time, should also fit in well with the content. But before that, we need to discover the keywords to use of course.
Finding the right keyword with keyword research:
So the first thing it to set you up with a keyword research tool. There are many, many options out there but for the time being, let’s stick to a free keyword research tool. If you are starting out, SEOsiteCheckup.com could be a pretty good option.
Simply login to the website (once you have created a free account) and tinker around a bit. You will be asked to put in your website and the service will then analyse whatever website you have inserted and come up with a pertinent list of keyword and other results.
This enables business owners who know nothing about website design to go back to their developer with a comprehensive list of technical items that need to be fixed.
Source: The Content Factory
You can also plug in the websites of your competitors and then compare results. This is very likely to give you some insights regarding what is being done right and what isn’t.
The keywords displayed before you will contain all sorts of information including the monthly search volume for the particular keyword, where do your pages rank for the keyword, whether the rank has gone up or down with time and so on. You can also pull up the list of the top 100 keywords (by traffic) that your website ranks for and then get to work upon the pages actually doing the ranking.
Always bear in mind that it is easier to increase your rank by 20 or even 30 spots, as compared to going from unranked to ranked in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). As such, try and find pages that you already rank for and then try to boost your rankings for the same. An easy way to do this is to use the SEM or SEOsiteCheckup.com.
How to recognize the keywords you are going to be aiming at:
Here are some ways to find and pinpoint the keywords you need to aim at as part of your SEO strategy.
- It would make a lot of sense to start off with a couple of spreadsheets to house all your ideas and findings. While the first of them should contain all the keywords you have managed to lay your hands on through the Keyword research tool, the second spreadsheet should house all your ideas, and the results of the brainstorming sessions you indulge in.
- Spreadsheets should form a vital and constant part of your keyword strategy if for the simple reason that it is very easy to come up with a relevant and useful idea and forget it almost at the same time without ever thinking about implementing it. With SEO, you are going to keep coming up with
goodideas all the time. However, it is important to pen them down so that you can go back and review them before putting them into action.
- Thanks to the first spreadsheet, you should have a rough idea of the kind of keywords you are going to be targeting. Use the second to come up with another list, this time, of the keywords that you feel like you should be targeting.
- Make this list out of keywords based on your hunches, research into your competitors (made possible thanks to SEOsiteCheckup) and so on. Compare this spreadsheet with the first one, to identify if you already rank for any of the keywords you have identified.
- Once you have both the spreadsheets compared out, and the common keywords identified, track down the search volumes for all the keywords in your second spreadsheets. Identify those with a high monthly search volume.
- These are the keywords you should be targeting, and it will be easier for you to boost your rank for keywords you already rank for — basically, ones that were common in both the spreadsheets.
Don’t set out with unrealistic expectations:
Also, while it is important to keep fighting, it is equally important to not to take on unrealistic goals. Don’t aim to dethrone the likes of Wikipedia, Microsoft and other such well established websites.
Instead, tweak the keyword and try to rank the first with a bit less competition. So make sure that you analyze the results obtained through keywords you had initially set out to target.
Check out who occupies the top few ranks. If it is highly authoritative websites that are occupying the top rungs, tweak these keywords until you reach a more level playing field,
You will have see more traffic and conversions ranking number one for a keyword phrase that has 1,500 monthly searches, than being in spot 15 for a keyword phrase that has 10,000 monthly searches.
Stay tuned for another informative article on how to boost the SEO of your e-commerce platform. And remember to take a look at our ULTIMATE XML SITEMAP and the VENDOR SEO SUITE ADDON, which promise to improve the SEO of your e-commerce platform, without you needing to move a finger.
Thank you for your interest!