How To Make Every Keyword Count
Today keywords are almost a currency in their own right; as long as you’re in the top 3 positions on SERPs (search engine results pages) that is!
But unless you have more money and time to know what to do with it, some keywords will be out of reach i.e. keywords like ‘consultant’, ‘media consultant’, ‘mentor’, ‘marketing mentor’, ‘coach’ or ‘life coach’ etc
Keywords like these are very generic – top level – and people that use them are generally information gathering and are not really looking to make a decision…
And if you were in the top 3 positions on Google for similar keywords, you could have potentially a large amount of traffic visiting a specific page on your site, you would see a very low conversion rate.
So what’s the answer?
Longtail Keywords
If I use one of the examples from above to explain, I think the concept would be easier to grasp:
Take a ‘top level’ keyword like ‘Life Coach’ and put it into Google: there’s about 58 million results! This is an ‘approximate’ measure of the amount of sites competing globally for the same keyword…
However, change it to ‘Life coach UK’ and the number of results drops dramatically to 3,980,000 … which is better but still too much competition
But if we made the example keyword search term
‘NLP life coach Hampstead London’ the competition drops to 2,030 – much better 
Now, armed with that information and the number of local people looking for that search term on a monthly basis – using Google’s Keyword Tool you’ll in a better position to get some targeted traffic.
…And finally
if you want to see how many of your competitors are optimising a page on their site for any given keyword term then use this:
allintitle:your keyword (note: no space after the ‘:’
To find the right keywords to optimise for can take time, I can easily spend a whole day finding golden nuggets for clients and cone up with about 30-40 thousand phrases, which each have approx 100 to 200 searches per day … that may not sound a lot of traffic by themselves however put all searches together and hey presto – watch the number of people visiting your site rocket ..!
But remember to use each keyword in your page title, heading tags and in your content to let the search engines know that that page is relevant to what people are searching for…
Related posts:
- Jennifer Aniston, ‘Big Butts’, website content and rising seas
I seem to write a lot about the importance of using the correct keywords but seeing as I’ve been getting more questions than normal I thought I’d put finger to... - You say potato I say solanum tuberosum: search term basics
You’ve written an excellent post, checked it for grammar and spelling errors and now you’re all ready to publish… but STOP… will what you’ve written get listed on the SERPs... - SEO: No animals were harmed in creating this website – part 4 of 8
META Description Over the years META tags have been abused by many in order to try and manipulate search results. But in doing so many sites have been blacklisted. The... - SEO: No animals were harmed in creating this website – part 3 of 8
Page <title> & how it helps increase search engine visibility This is part 3 of 8 of my mini series on SEO. Currently, people use search engines the most to... - Is your online activity beyond reproach or unapproachable
You might think that with all the benefits that come with using Social media why don’t more B2B organisations use it? Well some may feel that it doesn’t make sense...
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Lee (@leesmallwood). Thank you, a very timely and extremely useful blog that you've penned here. It is too easy to get carried away with large search volume stats and miss the cumulative impact of longer more specific phrases.