If you want to position your business or website in search engine results, choosing the right keywords is essential.
It’s all too common for new website owners to want to rank for highly competitive search terms, and this can result in significant disappointment.
Being realistic is essential when devising a keyword strategy for your search marketing campaign. If you have just started a new website, it’s unreasonable to expect that your website, which has no Google history, no inbound links and no brand visibility, to rank well.
If you try to rank for highly competitive keywords, you will no doubt be competing with sites that have very strong link profiles. This means that your efforts to rank well could take months if not years to come to fruition.
The best way to identify keywords is to use Google Adwords. This tool allows you to see how competitive a certain keyword term is, as well as the numbers of searches made for that keyword every month. Single keywords tend to have a high level of competition, with long tail, more specific terms tending to be less competitive.
The best option for choosing keywords for your new website is to opt for more precise, low competition, ‘long tail’ terms. This will allow you rank quickly, increase traffic and increase sales.
High competitive terms such as ‘solicitors’ will be close to impossible to rank for without a significant SEO budget and a lot of time. Many well established sites will have hundreds of thousands of links as a result of being a well-established brand with long-standing web presence and years of content marketing behind them. In order for your new website to build authority, choosing low competition keywords is the answer.
Long tail keyword selection requires you to isolate your keyword say ‘solicitor’ and combining it with other, more specific terms, such as ‘medical negligence’. If this is still a very competitive term, you can go further, perhaps including other types of keywords such as location of your business – ‘medical negligence solicitor London’. This will allow you to connect with people in your area needing your services, build your domain authority and rank for a low competition keyword.
This is a very basic treatment of keyword selection for new website owners, but will much more likely result in SEO budget savings, quicker results and more profits. It’s important to bear in mind that these things don’t happen overnight and require a lot of thinking to be successful. If you need guidance with your website, be sure to apply for a free website audit on our homepage.