Choosing the Right Keywords

Choosing keywords might be one of the top decisions and brainstorming processes you can go through in your SEO campaign. If you don’t target the right keywords in the search engines, you could get the wrong traffic, or you get less traffic than what you deserve. Knowing which keywords to put into your Meta tags & descriptions as well as which ones to link in your text, articles, and blog posts is essential.


First things first is to start brainstorming any term or phrase that comes to mind about your subject – Make sure you know your niche, and any subcategories that come with it. Start naming off anything that comes to mind, and ask friends and family to do this with you. Make sure you spend a good amount of time on this.
Next thing you want to do is go to your competitor’s sites and right click and select “view source” on their home page. Towards the top of the page look for “keywords” and find their list of terms & phrases they are targeting. Jot these down, erase any duplicates, and move on to the next step.

After going through a good number of competitor’s websites, you want to start using the blessed technology we have today. By using tools to track how many searches certain keywords get a month and how difficult it is to rank highly for them, you can start pinpointing the keywords you want to pursue. If you don’t have a HubSpot account yet, I suggest you go and take advantage of the free 30-day trial. They have a keyword tool that gives you the number of times different keywords or phrases are searched each month, and the difficulty of ranking for the keyword. If you don’t want to look into HubSpot, you can still use Google’s external Adwords tool.

Lastly before your keywords are set in stone, make sure you know the audience searching those terms. For example, “PEO” is searched 40,000 times a month (that’s a pretty solid number), but not everyone is searching for the same acronym. Some might be looking for a Philanthropic Educational Organization, a Program Executive Officer soldier, or information on the Professional Employer Organization. While this is a good term to pursue, it would also be advantageous to search a term with less searches, less competition, but more relevant traffic. Ranking first for a relevant term that gets 200 searches a month is most likely better than ranking 12^th for a term that is searched 5000 times a month that doesn’t drive 100% relevant traffic. Your goal is to target everyone looking for the type of product/service your website offers, so going after the smaller terms can add up into a large amount of relevant traffic. As the cliché goes, quality is better than quantity (smaller amounts of relevant traffic are better than larger amounts of irrelevant traffic).

If you don’t think ranking for all the much smaller terms is worthwhile, take one of my competitors for example. He doesn’t rank in the top 14 for our 2-3 biggest search terms, yet he still gets enough traffic to be considered a competitor (and a formidable opponent at that). The reason they still get frequent traffic is because they target searches by region, such as state & city. Because there are 50 states as well as about 50 cities worth targeting for SEO purposes, these low amounts of searches (around 100 each) can end up being combined to be searched around 5-10 thousand searches a month! Now that’s not as good as ranking first for a term like PEO (40,000), but if you target traffic by region, you can get some highly relevant traffic that have a higher conversion rate for leads.