So you’ve thought about what keywords you’d like to rank for on Google. You’ve started writing blog posts relating to these keywords, maybe you’ve even thought about hiring an SEO agency to optimise your website content for these desired keywords.
You’re doing the work to get your business website showing up on the Google search pages and that’s great! You’re already ahead of at least half of the pack 😉
BUT. Have you considered whether the SEO keywords you’ve chosen are even worth optimising for?
Think about it: what if the keywords you’re using are not being searched by anyone? Or what if they’re being used by so many other websites, including big competitors that you don’t stand much chance of outranking? It doesn’t really make sense to invest time and energy into optimising your website content for keywords that will never get you clicks.
So before you start your SEO strategy and choose your keywords, here’s what you need to consider:
Is Anyone Searching For Your Keywords?
First, you need to find out whether people are searching for the keywords you’re optimising for. There’s no point in optimising your whole website for a keyword phrase and getting it to show up on the first page of the Google search rankings if no one is even searching for that phrase. If no one is searching for it, then you can safely assume that no one is clicking on your website even if it’s the very first search result.
How do you find our a keyword’s search volume? You can use a tool like Keysearch to research your desired keywords. Among the plethora of information it spits out is the keyword’s search volume for your region.
If search volume is low (this is relative, but we’d consider <100 to be pretty low, and <50 to definitely be too low), then you know that your keyword strategy needs tweaking. What other keywords do you want to rank for? Try searching Keysearch for those to check on search volume and ensure it’s worth optimising for.
We love Keysearch because it also displays a lengthy list of related keywords to the one you’ve entered. Many are only tangentially related, but at least a handful of related keywords will be ones that would work for your website. Have a look at the “Volume” column and see which keywords people are searching for the most.
Not willing to pay for Keysearch? Check out one of these free SEO tools instead!
Is There Too Much Competition For Your Keywords?
Now that you have a new list of SEO keywords that have a large enough search volume, there’s one more check you should do before you get to work on the optimisation process.
It’s really important to find out whether you stand a chance at ranking for these keywords, or if the competition is too steep for you to make a splash in the search rankings.
On Keysearch, there is also a “Score” column for how competitive the keyword phrase is within your region. You can easily spot it as the one with the colored boxes. Just like the traffic light system, a red box means the keyword has too much competition, a green box means there’s less, and a blue box means there’s hardly any competition (i.e. go for this one!). Lower score = less competition, so try to aim for these sorts of keywords.
The score number has to do with a website’s domain authority, which you can look up on the Moz website. Generally the higher your domain authority, the better chance you have at ranking for your desired keywords. If your website is new or not very established, it will have a low domain authority, which probably means it doesn’t stand much of a chance at ranking for many keywords against the more established competition.
Typically, the most generic or common a keyword is, the higher the competition score will be – so consider using more long tail keywords in your SEO strategy.