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We love the story of the underdog – the scrawny new kid who topples the big, established (and always conveniently bad) behemoth against impossible odds. We also instill ideas in our children, employees and disciples of The Secret that “if you can dream it, you can achieve it” and “aim for the stars and maybe you’ll land on the moon.”
Well, I, for one, like my feet planted on Earth. Here, there’s oxygen, a climate that allows me to neither freeze nor boil, food and of course, Tivo. It’s not to say that we shouldn’t have challenging goals – it’s just that we should be realistic in both setting them and finding a way to meet them.
This is particularly true in the case of developing keywords and an SEO strategy for your content marketing. Let’s say your start-up business and blog are all about social media and you need to get traffic and build your reputation online.
If you’ve been reading ideaLaunch’s SEO tips, you know that incorporating the right keywords into an internal linking strategy are important ways of doing this. Let’s use the Keyword Tool from Google AdWords to give a real-world example. We type the term “social media” into the Keyword Tool and we instantly see a bunch of info, here, organized by competition:
Keyword search of "social media" - the top end
Now, you might think to yourself, “Great! Lots of people are searching for the term, “social media” – and that’s my focus – so there’s one of my keywords!” Well, you need to back up.
See that “Advertiser Competition” field and the full bar next to it? That indicates that a LOT of other websites are using the term “social media” in Google ads. While you might not be going for a Google ad but are instead using the keyword in your marketing content, it’s a very good indication of how frequently the term is being used by others in the same way you intend to.
Type “social media” in a Google search and see what comes up.
Do you think you can compete with those websites? Currently, Mashable – a website focused on social media and tech gadgets that’s been established for nearly five years, has a handful of paid writers and updates itself roughly eight times a day – doesn’t show up in the results until the third page (in the #22 position). Even if you wrote two great articles every day (realistic, yes?) and used the best internal linking strategy for the term “social media” – what position do you think you’d be in? Let’s be generous and say you showed up on page 30. How often have you searched through to page 30? I believe “never” is the word you’re now searching for.
Here’s where the advice to aim lower comes in. Google AdWord’s Keyword Tool does us a mighty favor by listing similarly searched terms. Take a look at some of the ones that are typed in less frequently but also have less competition:
Keyword search of "social media" - a little lower down the line
Now, these are hardly bottom of the barrel keywords, some of these get nearly 900 hits a month. Perhaps you can see keywords you can zone in more than others depending on your services (like “brand in social media”, “social media secrets” – of if you specialize, “government social media”).
So, it’s up to you. You can focus on the top word, achieve a ranking of #426 on the search engine (which will get you no hits) – or you can aim to be the top site (and most likely to get clicked on) for a word that gets 880 searches a month. I’m not the best at math, but 880 hits vs. 0 hits makes sense to me. It may not be the stars or the moon, but it makes for a great foundation to see traffic and revenue.
Tags: Google, keywords, SEO, seo keywords
