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People ask me all the time “What’s the most important aspect of SEO?” There’s hundreds of technical aspects of SEO that are critical to any campaign, but the most important part of SEO has nothing to do with the campaign itself– it has to do with your keywords.
Just What Exactly Is Niche Traffic?
There’s a lot of people searching on the internet for products and services. A large company like Apple, for example, can benefit from broad keywords such as “Computers”, “MP3 Players”, and “Tablets”. But all these keywords are very broad and might not target people wanted to buy an Apple product. So instead, Apple would see a higher conversion rate from their keywords if they went after niche specific keywords, such as “Macbook”, “Ipod”, and “Ipad”. But let’s take things a step further. Let’s assume you don’t have huge brand recognition like Apple, then what type of keywords would you go after? In this case, we would go after niche keywords such as “buying a computer”, “affordable MP3 players”, and “buy a tablet online” for example. These keywords would capture searchers not only looking for your product, but ones who are ready to buy your product.
How Do You Find Keywords For An SEO Campaign?
We start out each and every SEO campaign with extensive keyword research for a reason — because we truly believe it’s the most important part of the campaign. We’re going to be spending hundreds and even thousands of dollars on getting your site ranked for your keywords, so we better be 100% sure the keywords we select are the best ones for your company.
Keyword research doesn’t just consist of finding keywords with the most traffic. Finding quality keywords consists of:
Finding niche keywords— keyword that specifically describe your business. So instead of ranking Simple SEO Group for a broad keyword like “SEO” we’re ranked for keywords like “Chicago SEO” , “Internet Marketing For Small Business”, and “Small Business SEO“
Finding keywords with traffic — yes this is important, but we don’t JUST look at traffic. We need to find niche keywords with a high level of traffic that accurately describe your business so you can experience conversions from your web traffic
Finding keywords that you can rank for — if your budget is say $297 per month, it’s going to take a LONG time to get ranked for a highly competitive keyword. In this case we need to find micro niche keywords that have traffic but will be easier to rank for
I’ve seen dozens of SEO campaigns that don’t work because they are going after keyword that don’t have enough traffic, keywords that don’t convert well, or because they simply don’t get ranked for their keywords.
What’s Your Strategy For Getting Ranked?
We have a fairly straightforward SEO process. We start with research to find the keywords, move to on-site SEO to optimize your website for those keywords and for the campaign as a whole, then the majority of the work is the off site SEO. Off site SEO is the process of building links to your website from various natural sources to show search engines your business should be ranked higher for your keyword set. In 2012 and into the future, off site SEO isn’t as easy as it used to be. Anyone used to be able to build any types of links and get their website ranked, but today that isn’t the case. It takes a unique blend of link types with a unique blend and ratio of anchor text with high quality unique content to get websites ranked today. While it isn’t an extremely complex process, it is extremely time consuming. Because of this, many SEO companies today still use older, outdated methods because they believe it will save them time and money, but all it ends up doing is leaving their clients with subpar results.
If you’re ready to learn more about the keyword possibilities for your niche, traffic estimates, and the costs associated with getting your website ranked higher in search results, contact us for a free consultation or call us at 1-888-918-1665. We’ve seen SEO campaigns help dozens of small businesses that we’ve worked with, and we know we can formulate a campaign that can help yours as well.