Keyword Research Is An Absolute Must…
In the beginning targeting keywords that are very competitive is a mistake
Simply because you can spend a lot of time and money, working on ranking for these competitive keywords. After a few months you don’t see any results or very poor results. Its much better to go for a large number of low hanging fruit which comes in the form of long tail keyword phrases or nested keywords normally 3 to 5 words.
In the beginning 1-2 word keyword phrases are not a good idea
Let me explain
When it comes to SEO you need to look for (well at least in the beginning ) what we call nested keywords.
Nested Keyword Phrases are keyword phrases where your main 1 or 2 keyword phases (you know the ones I said not to directly go after in the beginning)Â are nested within a longer version of the keyword phrase.
So for example Insurance or life insurance are the main keywords for your industry but are way to competitive to start going after and in most cases probably to broad, a nested keyword phrase would be something like:-
Life insurance advice in London
you see how the main keyword is nested within a longer version of the main keyword phrase, also the nested keyword is more precise in the detail of what the person is a looking for which will make it easier to target your content more closely around what your visitor is looking for which has a knock on effect that makes it easier to lead your visitor into your most wanted response e.g. to click and ad, fill in a form or best of all buy your solution to there problem.
When doing your keyword research you need to also focus on related keyword or synonyms
For example life insurance is related to life cover
So you need a keyword list that has both nested and related keywords that you drill down into, to find more nested keywords that you can work with in a up and coming post I will talk about using keyword research tools to make your keyword development a breeze.
Another thing to consider at the beginning stages of building your keyword list is your market depth.
Is you site going be an authority on every thing related to your market/industry or is it going specialize on a particular topic within your market.
Taking some time to consider what goals you have for your site and deciding who exactly you are targeting with your keywords, will give you a great insight on how wide or narrow your keyword list needs to go.
I would go as far to say that your doomed if you don’t take some time and write down your goals be very clear and concise with what it is you want your site to achieve the more precise you are with your site goals the easier it will be to reverse engineer your plan to accomplish these goals.