How to Choose The Best Keywords To Drive Traffic To Your Website

Having your website appear on the first page of the search engine results is THE goal for most marketers, yet few possess the skills to actually achieve it.

Now, of course there are many steps you need to take in order to be found by the search engines for related keywords,  and taking your time to research the best possible keywords and phrases for your Website is THE most important step you can take in grabbing your share of this organic search engine traffic, which of course is free (from a monetary point of view anyway).

So how do you do it?. Well in this blog post today I have put together a few short tips which you can begin to put into practice immediately to give an instant boost to your search engine results….so read on!

How to Choose The Best Keywords To Drive Traffic To Your Website

Many marketers make the mistake of assuming that ranking for one generic term related to their website will turn their website into an automatic cash-generating monster. Although that one generic term may provide a good stream of traffic and brand awareness, this doesn’t mean the traffic will convert into sales or leads, and the costs of targeting that particular keyword or phrase can easily spiral out of control.

Therefore it is best to target multiple keywords that not only drive traffic, but also lead to the all important conversions. (sales).

So what do you do first?

First of all you need to consider who your target audience is and what you’re actually trying to achieve.

Do you sell products? Do you offer services? Is it more content focused?  There are all sorts of visitors (traffic) who will arrive at your website from potentially many different sources,  so understanding your audience, and the reasons they visit, will obviously help to focus your efforts.

With this in mind, you can now do your keyword research. Keyword suggestion tools, such as Google’s Keyword Planner here tell you which keywords are typed into searches, and how many searches were conducted on those keywords. Also, by typing a keyword in you will see a selection of alternative keyword phrases that contain your generic term with an estimate of how many searches per month.

The most popular Keyword research tool is of course Google.  Just type in “Google Keyword Planner” and follow the link or click here.

A similar tool is located at Wordtracker.com.  Wordtracker queries the meta search engine data so may not be representative of what is being searched on the web as a whole, but it is still good for suggesting alternative phrases and related phrases.  Wordtracker also has a subscription service which gives you multiple membership options.

How to Choose The Best Keywords To Drive Traffic To Your Website

The next step in choosing the best keywords is checking how competitive they are.  Ideally you want to find keywords that have a lot of monthly searches plus low competition. Again using The Google Keyword Planner will enable you to establish this relatively quickly. You can find more about using the Google Keyword Planner by reading this earlier blog post!

Once you start using these tools, you will quickly build a list of effective keywords which can drive a massive amount of traffic to your website and begin to actually make some money from your online business, which at the end of the day should be your goal.

One last thing…

You may also want to consider “long tail” keywords.

So what exactly is a “Long Tail” keyword I hear you ask?

Well, these can be obscure multi word phrases, for example: If the keyword is “Lose Weight” you will find (using the Keyword Planner) that this is a VERY competitive term with millions of searches a month and EXTREMELY difficult (if not impossible) for a new business to rank for quickly.

However, if you where to choose a “Long Tail” version of this keyword e.g: “How to Lose Weight Fast in Your Forties” you will find fewer searches but much less competition aswell which makes it a lot easier and quicker to rank.

So, as you can see, the process of choosing keywords isn’t something that should be taken lightly, and there’s a lot of work to do if you want to maximise the ability of your website to attract natural search traffic. But hopefully this blog post How to Choose The Best Keywords To Drive Traffic To Your Website has helped.

So get searching.

All The Best
-Jon

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