Introduction
Before any SEO strategy starts, one of the most crucial areas to consider is which keywords you are going to use to optimise the website for.
Selecting the right keywords is crucial to the success of the marketing strategy, for example, the business must select words which have enough search volume, but that are also achievable within the set marketing budget.
What are keywords?
Keywords are words, or phrases that people use to find your business. For example, most people will find our business by typing “Seo Cardiff”.
Therefore, the site must be optimised for that term, and also other keywords so that the website becomes optimised for all the words which are likely to generate the website business.
However, the complication comes when an SEO consultant must work out all the keywords that are used to find that particular business.
For example if you optimising for a plumbing website, it’s not normally good enough just to optimise for “plumber + area”, the agency should optimise for “emergency plumber + area” or “central heating installers + area”.
To neglect any keyword could be doing the business a disadvantage, for example, a plumbing business not being optimised for “central heating installers” is likely to be a large disadvantage to that business.
Why is it so important to select the right keywords?
Selecting keywords that are too easy could mean that the words don’t have enough search volume, which basically means nobody is searching for them, so they are a waste of time optimising the site for that keyword.
On the other hand, be too ambitious and your seo budget may well be a drop in the ocean up against competitors that may well be spending 10 x as much as you each month on seo services.
Why should my agency factor in the difficulty level of the keywords?
Some business owners do not appreciate how competitive some business sectors actually are. For example, a building company may believe that it will be easy to optimise a website for “loft conversions + area”.
However, as most seo consultants know, there will be many national companies that advertise on a local level as well. These national companies may have considerable seo budgets, and this should be factored in when planning which keywords the business wants to target.