DIY SEO #11: Choosing Your Keyword Strategy

Choosing the right keywords may be the most important choice you make in SEO.  Choose the right keywords for your SEO plan and you will increase traffic to your site and succeed.  Choose the wrong keywords and you not only won’t see any traffic increase, but you’ll be wasting valuable time and money on meaningless SEO work.

When choosing the keywords you are going to target, you have three options are going to have the option of going after very competitive keywords that get a lot of traffic or less competitive keywords that don’t get as much traffic.  If you have a very authoritative site with lots of pages, you may be one of the lucky few who can just pick any keyword for any page, but that’s very rare.  More likely you have low or moderately authoritative site and your keyword research has revealed that you cannot currently compete for the more competitive keywords.  You also, more than likely, don’t have as many pages as there are keywords for you to target.  So, you have to start making some choices.

There are 3 keywords strategies that you can choose:

1. Target the less competitive keywords for now. In our last step you took an honest look at your situation and decided on your SEO plan.  If your SEO plan includes little or even a moderate amount of link building, then you should not expect to be able to build the authority of your pages up very quickly to rank well for highly competitive keywords.  So, you will need to optimize for less competitive keywords right now.  This will give you at least some traffic immediately, which is the whole point, right.

As you do whatever amount of link building you do, you may gradually increase your page’s authority and be able to optimize for more competitive keywords, but for now, you need to optimize for the keywords that will get you traffic.

2. Target the highly competitive keywords and build links like crazy. If you’re SEO plan includes a lot of link building, then you may be able to go ahead and target the more competitive keywords now and build a ton of natural links.

A bit of warning, though.  If you underestimate how competitive the keywords are compared to your current authority or how competitive your competition is, it may take a while for you to rank well and you may find yourself becoming frustrated at the lack of results, not to mention that with no increase in traffic while you build up the authority of the pages, you are missing out on an increase in conversions.  If you do go with this option, you absolutely need to go all out on your link building.

3. Find less competitive keywords to target now which happen to contain the more competitive keywords. This is a kind of middle ground between the first two options.  Let’s use this blog as an example.  “SEO” is a very competitive keyword, but “Christian SEO” is a much less competitive keyword and “Christian SEO information” is even less competitive.  If I target “Christian SEO information”, “Christian SEO” and “SEO” are also being targeted because they are included in the phrase “Chrisitan SEO information”.  So, if my site is pretty weak in the search engines right now, I could target “Christian SEO information” knowing that as my site gains authority it is already targeting the more competitive “Christian SEO” and “SEO” keywords.

The trick with this strategy is that you may have to pass up on some more popular keywords which you are currently able to compete because they do not contain the keywords you ultimately want to target.  So, I may find that I could compete for “Christian search marketing information” and that it is more competitive than “Christian SEO information”, but I would pass on “Christian search marketing information” because it doesn’t contain the keywords “Christian SEO” or “SEO”.

Choosing Your Plan
I’m going to go ahead and recommend you choose either strategy 1 or strategy 3.  As you may have been able to tell from the description of the second strategy, I’m not too keen on it.  Quite frankly, I questioned whether to even include it, but it is an option.

I would usually just recommend going with strategy 3, but for that option to be the best choice, you do need to be doing a decent amount of link building.  If your SEO plan doesn’t include much link building, then you may be better off just going after the best keywords you can get now.

There are two things I really like about the third keyword strategy.  First, the strategy targets keywords you can rank for now, so you get immediate results.  Immediate results means you can start to grow now.  Second, each page has a keyword plan.  You move up through several keywords over time as the page’s authority increases.  Each keyword in that plan is like a mini goal.  Every time you move up to a new keyword you are not only seeing an increase in traffic, but you are achieving a goal and getting a sense of success.  That keeps motivation up and makes you more likely to continue and reach those very competitive keywords.

Final Thoughts
As you select your keyword strategy, keep in mind that optimizing for a keyword which is too competitive is just about as good as not optimizing at all.  If you don’t have a chance to get into the top 10 or 20 results quickly, then the keyword won’t bring you any traffic.  So, you might as well optimize for less competitive keywords for which you can rank well and get at least some traffic.  Something is better than nothing.

Choose the keyword strategy that will work best for your overall SEO strategy.

Today’s Task:

• Choose your keyword strategy.

Photo by jambe

Which keyword strategy do you like best?

Are there other keyword strategies that you like?

DIY SEO #10: Planning Your SEO Strategy <- DIY SEO: Main -> DIY SEO #12: Choosing Your Target Keywords