Blue Wave Concept's Blog

Selecting keywords is a sophisticated search process. Not only do you want to to select appropriate keywords to draw traffic, the goal is to find keywords that will bring the right kind of traffic to the website.

The key is to evaluate words on the basis of relevance, traffic, competition and commercial appeal.

Optimizing for “number one on Google” is all the rage. What most SEO’s won’t tell you is that 90% of all keywords have insignificant traffic.

That’s a bold statement, but it’s true.

When you are in the midst of creating an optimization plan for your website it’s important to understand the difference between being number one on Google and being in the number two slot in the search.

It’s a big difference.

The latest stats I’ve seen indicate that the difference between number one on Google and number is that #1 gets 42% of the clicks, #2 gets only 12%. The stats go down from there. Number three is roughly 8%, number 4 is 6%, #5 is 5%, 6 is 4% and 7 is 3%.

Obviously it pays to be number one on Google.

But the question begs to be asked… Number one on Google for What?

The keywords you select may be easy to optimize for, with little competition. But even if you win the battle to be number one, no one is searching for those keywords, so what really have you won?

A true analysis of keywords takes into account the competitive landscape for that word – what is the number and level of competitors, as well as the strength of those competitors.

Pick your battles wisely.

Consider also the commercial value of the keyword or keyword phrase. How profitable optimizing for that word winds up to be is dependent upon it’s commercial value.

One way to determine the ‘commercial’ value of a keyword or keyword phrase is to evaluate it using Google’s adwords tool.

Selecting relevant keywords that offer traffic, low competition and which also have commercial appeal is part of crafting an effective website. Remember not only will you need a main theme keyword, you will also require category keywords to bolster your website’s inbound marketing magnetism throughout the phases of the sales funnel.

Remember that is anyone promises to get you to “number one” in Google, you should be suspicious. If the keyword or keyword phrase is worth optimizing for, it’s not going to be something that will happen overnight. Anyone offering “black hat” techniques, should be avoided. If you aren’t sure what that may mean, read about the recent experiences with JC Penney and Overstock. Recuperating after being blacklisted or penalized is a difficult road, so always try to err on the side of using Google Best Practices for organic optimization.

One of the great things about being a Hubspot Certified Partner is that HuDo Hubspot For mebspot does offer great tools to evaluate how the website is performing. Many of our clients are on the Hubspot platform, which helps them to work on their site, and also to monitor the site’s performance.

How do you select keywords for your website? Do you have a method or software tool that seems to work for you? What word density do you aim for, and do you include semantic search terms?