How to find keywords for SEO

Any business that has an significant online presence discovering the most appropriate keywords is a vital ingredient to online success. In many cases, your customers will discover your business by searching online for the services or products that you sell via Google. Therefore getting your website to the top of search engines is going to be crucial and is mostly determined by the choice of keywords that your website targets.

How to find keywords for SEO is therefore a skill worth developing.

Image credit: seolium.com

The temptation for a lot of website owners is to target the most common, obvious keywords for search. For example, if your business sells watches you may be tempted to target a phrase such as “watches for sale” but as you can see in the screenshot below, taken from the excellent keyword research tool provided by Twinword.com, this phrase may be hugely popular but is being targeted by a sizable number of other websites.

9900 monthly searches but with a SEO Competition score of 100 and a Paid Competition score of 100 it’s obvious that “watches for sale” may not be the most effective use of your time to target as it’s a phrase that a lot of your competitors are also targeting (and they have a big head start on you).

Instead, a more profitable approach may be to target a few, reasonably popular phrases that collectively garner as many (or more) monthly visits but that your competitors aren’t targeting as actively. This is a tactic employed by many search specialists including London SEO companies.

One example could be “mens gold watches for sale”. This phrase gets 260 monthly searches but the SEO competition is 78 – much lower than the 100 of the “watches for sale” phrase mentioned earlier. This suggests that “mens gold watches for sale” should be easier to achieve a high position on the search engines should you target it with some well optimised pages on your website.

Better again could be the phrase “best mens watches under 500”. This gets 320 monthly searches but only has an SEO Competition score of 59. Or, you could target “best watch brands for men” which gets 1000 monthly searches with a SEO Competition score of 61.

You can start to see how combining a number of less popular searches is a more effective keyword strategy for your website SEO.

Working with my example of a watch retailer and using the Twinword.com keyword suggestion tool, these are the phrases I would target…

Hopefully you can see that just targeting a phrase because you think it will work for you could be ineffective but if you use a keyword search tool like the one described here you can have a much more successful SEO strategy and work towards success for your website.