Ranking your website high in the search engines can benefit you in a few big ways. The obvious reason that probably got you interested in SEO in the first place, is that it can bring you in more sales. But another benefit that is often overlooked is that it makes people view your site as an authoritative site.

People using Google trust that when they run a search, Google is going to provide them with the best results. This means when they see your site in the search results, they are going to automatically trust your site. This will ultimately lead to more sales and long-term success.

Ultimately, this is something you can do yourself or something you could work with an SEO company on. We are going to go over how you can build a keyword strategy yourself so that you know which keywords are important for your business to rank for in the search engines.

Find Content Topics You Could Write About

The first thing you need to do is make a list of all the content topics you could write about. This would include any information about your industry that you know well and can provide real value. When creating this list, be sure to only include topics that you would write at least 500-1,000 words on.

Depending on how big this list is, you can move on to another way to find topics to write about. The next way to find content ideas is to look at what your competitors are doing? If they have content written, take what they wrote about and put your own spin on it. Don’t copy their content, but just use their topics as ideas of what you can write about.

Another way to find content ideas is to think about all the top questions in your industry. After working with clients/customers you probably have a good idea of the most frequently asked questions in your industry. This is the perfect opportunity to write about those topics so that people will see your business as an authoritative business. You don’t have to give away all your “secrets” but provide value so that the people that find your content trust you and will consider working with you.

Find the Best Keywords from that Content

Now that you have your content ideas, you need to figure out which keywords people might frequently search that you could try to rank for. One thing I have learned from doing SEO on many sites NEVER assume that you can guess what keywords will get searched frequently. You will often be surprised at what you think gets searched a lot and what actually gets searched a lot.

Luckily, there is a helpful free tool you can use to figure out what keywords and keyphrases get searched often. It is the Google Keyword Planner.

With this tool, you type in some keywords that you think might be good to use as a starting point. Then it will tell you the search volume for that keyword, and it will also give you other keyword suggestions based around the one that you typed.

Type in a few different keywords and look through the suggested keywords that Google provides. This is a great way to find keyword opportunities to target.

Some things to look at when analyzing these keywords are the search volume and Cost Per Click (CPC). Cost Per Click is how much advertising is spending for each click to their website. The higher this number usually means it is a valuable keyword to target. The best thing to do here is to try to find keywords with a high search volume and CPC.

Determine the Difficulty of Ranking for those Keywords

After you have a good list of keywords that seem like they would be beneficial to rank for, now it is important to determine how hard it is going to be to rank for those keywords. There is no sense in trying to rank for a high difficulty keyword if your site is brand new. Your site just won’t have the authority to beat out the big brands in the search results.

There are a few ways to determine keyword difficulty. On the Google Keyword Planner that I was talking about earlier, it gives you a measurement for “competition”. It will tell you if each keyword has low, medium, or high competition.

After you have that information, another thing I like to do is to perform a search for the keywords I want to target. Then I will look at all the results on the first page and see how many of these websites I recognize. If the first page is filled with big brands, then you probably will not be able to rank higher than them anytime soon. Look for keywords that have websites on the first page that you don’t recognize.

Finally, Selecting Keywords

After you have done your research, this part should be easy. All you need to do now is analyze the information that you gathered, and decide which keywords are going to be the best to target.

Prioritize your keywords by looking at a few different things:

• How important it is for you to rank for it
• Search Volume
• Cost Per Click
• Keyword Difficulty

Remember, the ideal scenario is to try to rank for keywords that have a high search volume, high CPC, and low keyword difficulty.

This should give you a good list of keywords that you can focus on. If you run out of keywords from this list, just rinse and repeat. By setting up this keyword research strategy, you should never run out of keywords to try to rank for.

Author Bio

My name is Tyler Nalbach and I have been working in SEO for two years. I am the owner of an SEO Company, SEO Align. My goal is to help website owners increase their organic traffic and exposure.

How to Build a Keyword Research Strategy for Free

Understanding eCommerce presented by Digital Media Marketing