In A Word…Keyword Research
Many SEO experts, SEO Barnsley included, agree that the most most important of SEO is Keyword Research. There’s no point in ranking for the wrong keywords and it’s often quite easy for SEO companies to rank their clients for low competition, low traffic keywords that will bring no traffic and take little effort to rank for because very few other pages on the web are trying to rank for them. So what does this tell us? Keyword Research is the starting point of SEO. It’s about having a goal of what you’d like to rank for. For example, when we first set out to rank for the key phrase “SEO Barnsley” we decided it this search phrase would bring us any traffic and then looked at the competition for the keyword. This gave us a good idea of the amount of effort that would be required to ranking our website for “SEO Barnsley”.
Set A Business Goal
Keyword Research, is therefore, about setting a goal for your business, whereas in a journey if the SEO Strategy is like the route plan, Keyword Research is the actual destination i.e. the end result of what your website should eventually rank for. Depending on the strength of the competition, your starting point and the effort/time/money/resource put in, you should achieve your results in a given timescale.
Content Is King
So if Keyword Research is the most important aspect of SEO, which we certainly agree that it is, what is the other most important aspect of SEO? We think it’s content. In fact content is king. I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but it’s true. But a common misconception is that content is just written content, or words on the screen. However, content includes a range of media too, including images, video, audio and so on. So we’re talking articles, blog posts, YouTube videos, podcasts, audio files, infographics, memes and much more.
What Is The Keyword Research Process?
Our advice is do your Keyword Research and find a SEO company (such as ours of course) to perform this vital SEO task for you. But how is Keyword Research carried out? Keyword Research involves looking for keywords, search phrases, key phrases etc, that are likely to drive targeted traffic to your website. We’re talking keywords with high commercial intent which include phrases that indicate a high intention to buy. If you’re selling high end handbags then you don’t need to rank for cheap handbag. Maybe you do then try to convince your audience to purchase a higher quality item but generally you’ll want to avoid putting resource into wrong keywords. Instead you’d be much better spending your time, resource and efforts, ranking for “quality handbags” or similar, more applicable, keywords. Don’t just take our word for it though. Do your research or hire us to carry out Keyword Research. We use a method called “Goldilocks Keyword Research” where we’re looking for keywords that are not too hot, not too cold, but just right. But too hot we mean very high competition. Too cold refers to low traffic (afterall there’s no point in ranking for keywords that bring in no traffic). Just right refers to enough competition to show that the keyword drives traffic. You can of course hit milestones by going after lots of lower search volume keywords which will all add up to bring in decent amounts of traffic. And on the other end of the scale have enough resource to go after high competition keywords. But the best bang for your buck will generally to be to go after those Goldilocks keywords.