If your project is going to fall down, this is where it all will start, Keyword Research. Guaranteed search engine optimisation can be easily achieved for an obscure phrase that few people search for. What about the real phrases that are actually being searched by users? This is where we perform some of our best work, keyword research. Apart from assessments, which are always time consuming, keyword research can literally take up a day or more depending on the size of a given website.
What's so difficult about finding keywords you ask? You created some or performed a quick search on Overture or Google free services in only minutes! This is why you're here and why you're looking at outsourcing your SEO work. On the search engine side of the house, you need the right keywords, and the correct page phrase architecture to rank highly within the search engines. Simply jamming words within a page simply doesn't work anymore.
We will perform detailed keyword analysis using Word Tracker, other sources and manually within the engines, to determine the best phrases for your niche. Each page requires a set of incorporated relevant phrases, combined with some semantic indexing (related thesaurus terms). This is what feeds the search engines.
Competitiveness of phrases is determined by two primary factors. Firstly, how competitive your target market is and secondly, how many people are targeting that phrase within a given search engine - not how many people are searching the term. You can have 50,000 people daily searching a phrase, but the phrase only becomes competitive if, for example, 1000 people actually include it within their website structure. The keywords used within an SEO campaign are a major factor in the pricing. The more competitive the phrase, the more work needed to get your page to rank into the top 20 results. Let me explain a little further:
Non-Competitive Phrases - are the easiest of all phrases to rank highly. What determines them? Well, at the end of the day, the search engine popularity for that phrase, the word tracker results and myself. Non-competitive phrases have no desired string, ie. two, three or four word phrase, they are simply not highly searched by anyone in the world or specific region. Regions are a large factor in this analysis. It is worth remembering, that if your site is only a UK or Australian based site, then results within global searches are not generally successful. You can perform an "all in title" search for a phrase within Google Web and Google .au and you will get completely different results for competitiveness. So this regional factor is an assessed feature.
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For example, the term "gift baskets" in Google results returns an All In Title search of 464,000 competing sites, where as, the same search in Google .au results returns only 5,580 competing sites. This is certainly a reasonably competitive phrase, and you can see the dramatic difference in work effort and obviously cost, to achieve the same ranking within a regional area only.
A lot of non-competitive relevant phrases will deliver a broad spectrum of targeted traffic to your site. SEO copywriting is the best method to achieve rankings across the the engines for non-competitive phrases. Only a little external link work is required with this method.
Mildly Competitive Phrases - now starting to require some substantial external link work to get ranked highly. It is not a factor of gaining links for a website homepage, but more a factor of gaining quality links for each page relevant to the mildly competitive phrase contained upon it. Where people begin to get off track here is targeting the wrong phrases. For example: if you sell "widgets" in the UK only, then you only need to rank for relevant widget terms within the UK. If you sell "widgets" globally, then you need to rank for widgets globally. This can push your widgets term from a mildly competitive to highly competitive term just as the example with non-competitive terms, except in reverse order.
Mildly competitive phrases in conjunction with non-competitive
[Pullout: If
your project is going to fall down, this is where it all will
start]phrases weaved together within your pages, deliver
a substantial quantity of relevant traffic to your pages. Most
websites will have at least one or two mildly competitive
phrases.
Highly Competitive Phrases - require the most work and therefore, are the most expensive of all phrases to gain high rankings. The determination, however, remains the same. If your phrase is searched 50,000 times daily, though is competed with by say 10,000 other websites, then the cost will be somewhat higher. We determine what highly competitive phrases, if any, are required and most suited to your website to reflect the information and site structure, then target them. A highly competitive phrase may take 6, 12 or 24 months to obtain substantial rankings, depending upon its real competitiveness. What you must remember here is that all the other websites have had a head start on you to obtain those rankings. Time consuming, very costly, but achievable and when relevant, will deliver the most targeted traffic to your site.
What is the aim of keyword research? Return On Investment (ROI). As mentioned at the start, if there is a secret to SEO, it is all within the keyword research. Even when looking at other methods of advertisement, you will notice it all reverts to keyword research, to find the appropriate sites and areas of the WWW to publish.
