Keyword Difficulty
The wise choice of the right keywords you will optimize for is the first and vital step to a successful SEO campaign. If you fail on this very first step, the road ahead is very bumpy and most likely you will only waste your (or your client’s) money and time. There are several ways to decide which keywords to optimize for and generally the final list of them is made after a careful study of what the online population is searching for, which keywords have your competitors selected and above all – which are the keywords that you feel describe your site best. All of this is great and certainly this is the way to go but if you want to increase your chances of success, additional research is never too much, especially when its results will save you the shots in the dark.
Dreaming High – Shooting the Top-Notch Keywords?
After you have created a long and detailed list of all the profitable keywords that are searched by tens of thousands a day, do not hurry yet. It is great that you have selected popular keywords but it would be even greater if you have chosen keywords for which top positioning is attainable with reasonable effort. If you have many competitors for the keywords you have chosen, chances are, no matter how hard you try, that you will hardly be able to overtake them and place your site amongst the top ten results. And as every SEO knows, if you can’t be on the first page (or on the second and in the worst case on the third one) of the organic search results, you’d better think again if the potential gain from optimization for those exacting words is worth the effort. It is true that sometimes even sites that are after the first 50 results get decent traffic from search engines but it is certain that you can’t count on that. And even if you somehow manage to get to the top, do you have any idea what it will take to keep the good results?
You can feel discouraged that all profitable keywords are already occupied but it is too early to give up. Low-volume search keywords can be as lucrative as the high-volume ones and their main advantage is that you will have less competition. The SEO experts prove that it is possible with less effort and within budget to get much better results with low-volume search keywords than if you targeted the high-volume search ones. In order to do this, you need to make an estimate about how difficult it would be to rank well for a specific keyword.
Get Down to Earth
The best way to approximation how difficult it would be to rank well for a particular keyword is by using the suitable tools. If you search the Web, you will see several keyword difficulty tools. The idea behind selecting multiple tools is not that you have so much free time that you need to find a way to waste it. If you decide only one tool, you will finish your research faster but having in mind the different results that each tool gives, you’d better double check before you start the optimization itself.
You may also want to check for numerous keywords or keyword phrases. You will be surprised to see how different the estimated difficulty for similar keywords is! For instance, if you are optimizing a financial site, which deals mainly with credits and loans, and some of your keywords are finance, money, credit, loan, and mortgage, running a check with the produces results like these (the percentages are rounded but you get the idea). It seems that the keyword finance is very tough and since your site is targeted at credits and loans and not on stock exchange or insurance, which are also branches of finance, there is no need to cry over the fact that it is very difficult to compete for the finance keyword.
You may desire to bookmark some of these tools for future use as well. They will be very useful to monitor possible changes on the keyword difficulty landscape. After you have optimized your site for the keywords you have chosen, occasionally check again the difficulty of the keywords you are already optimizing for because the percentages are changing over time and if you discover that the competition for your keywords has increased, create some more efforts to retain the gained positions.
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