A SEO Keyword comes in two flavors: the main keyword for your site and the keyword for each individual page of your site.
It’s critical to choose a good main SEO keyword for your site because it will affect how search engines position your site against other sites in their indexes. Individual page keywords aren’t very important, so you can experiment with them to see which keywords are most effective for your site.
Your SEO Keyword Goal
Most people think that the goal of a good SEO keyword is to attract traffic—but that’s not the case. The goal of a good SEO keyword is to attract customers, a subtle difference. Recently I published an article about how more traffic does not always mean more traffic, and now we know why, we have attracted the wrong traffic.
Customers are anyone from whom you earn money. For example, a customer on a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertisement-based site is anyone who clicks one of your advertisements. On most PPC sites, 99% or more of visitors don’t click advertisements, so they aren’t customers.
Most sites research SEO keywords by computing how much traffic a particular SEO keyword will bring to their site. But now that you know that your goal is to attract customers, you can attempt to compute how many customers a particular keyword will bring to your site.
For example, keyword phrases containing the word “free” often attract more visitors than similar keyword phrases without the word—but people who want free stuff may be less inclined to buy a product or click an advertisement, so you’ll get fewer overall customers.
How To Find An SEO Keyword Which Attracts Customers
The first and best place to look for a SEO keyword which attracts customers is at your successful competition. Your competitors—the ones who are making money—have a proven keyword base which attracts not just traffic but paying customers, so look at their keywords for both inspiration and for any opportunities to do what they do better.
I do not recommend using exactly the same keywords as an established business—direct competition will hurt both you and them. Instead look for a SEO keyword you can quickly dominate without much opposition.
The other way to find an SEO keyword is to use one of the many free or paid keyword research tools. The top free tool is Google’s AdWords keyword research tool which tells you roughly how many people search for particular keywords in the typical month.
Consider the following three points when you read those statistics:
1. Searchers don’t equal visitors. Even the top result for a particular search term will probably never get more than 50% of the search traffic.
2. Low-traffic search terms are highly variable from month to month.
3. Again, visitors are customers, so continue to look for a SEO keyword which attracts customers.
How To Find The Best SEO Keyword
The best SEO keyword is a proven keyword, and the best way to prove a SEO keyword is by testing it. So how do you test a SEO keyword?
Simple—you test a SEO keyword by putting it on just one page of your site, or maybe just a few pages. Then you track how well those pages do. In particular:
1. Check your search engine rank for that keyword phrase.
2. Check your conversion rate. This is the number of visitors you get from the term divided by the number of visitors who become customers through that page.
3. Compare the testing keywords against the established keywords on the other parts of your site.
If the test is a success, you can use the proven SEO keyword on other parts of your site. The more successful the keyword, the more you want to move it towards the core parts of your site where you make the most money. Unsuccessful keywords should be removed or revised.
Don’t Fear A Bad SEO Keyword
The most important thing you can do for your site is proceed bravely. Know that you’re going to occasionally choose a bad SEO keyword—but that you can always rewrite that SEO keyword into something which works better for your site.
This is where SEOPressor v5 can help. It will gage your SEO keyword density and format to give you a SEO score. This makes it very easy to change directions with your keyword as you only need to enter a new keyword and then start to optimize.
The wonderful thing about websites is that they’re not set in stone, so you can—and should—keep tweaking them over and over to get the most benefit out of them.
Conclusion
See what keywords your competition uses to attract customers, adapt those keywords to your site, figure out which keywords attract the most customers, and use what you’ve learned to choose the main SEO keyword for your site.
Then continue to expand the number of keywords you use on your site to expand your reach in your market and find new keywords which work. And never be afraid to try out a new SEO keyword.