Find the right keywords – quick and easy

When I am talking to people about SEO, many people don’t really know what to do to find the right keywords for their page. How do we find them? What do we do?

So I have been telling them about this method here. It’s a quick and easy – step by step.

So are you ready? Coffee in your cup? Let’s start.

1. Find the most relevant keywords for your business

‘First you will have to write down your ideas. This should be a brainstorming.

Forget about how much traffic theses keywords are getting. Just focus on the words.

If you are selling cars – a relevant keyword is “cars” or “used cars”, “blue cars”, “old cars”, “new cars”. This is a very qualitative process. So write all your ideas on a piece of paper.

You can also get ideas from Google Trend  or Google Insight.

Another great tool is the Google Keywords Tool. Type in the words “used cars” and see a lot of suggestions. Google Keywords Tool doesn’t know everything – so you might have to take away some of the words it is suggesting.

So now you have a list with a lot of words right?

2. Now check out the traffic

You might be able get the rank position 1 on Google with the phrase “old blue beautiful cars from New York”, but if there is only 10 people looking for that word phrase, it’s not going to help you to drive traffic to your site right?

So – go to Google Keywords Tool and write in the words from your list.

Now you can check how much traffic there is on the internet from your suggested words.

Well this was step number 2. Still easy right?

3. How much competition

Now step 3 is about competition. If there is a lot of competition for a keyword, it will get very difficult for you to rank number 1 or number 10.

You might have found that the word “used cars” is a very relevant word for you, and it gets tons of traffic. But but but (there is always a but right?) – when you are checking the competition for this word, you will find that the top 10 companies on Google all have over 50.000 backlinks and a lot of traffic to their site. So no matter how much you are trying, you might never get enough link-juice or traffic to get into the top 10.

You can check the competition in different programs. I am using Market Samurai for this. Its not a free program, but it saves me a lot of time.

Another program is the SEO Power Suite. And I am sure there are a lot of other great programs out there.

In Google Keyword Tool you can see if a competition is high, medium or low. But remember the competition in Google Keyword Tool is for the PPC keywords.

Okay I know this step wasn’t so easy – but it’s still very important.

Now we are almost done here.

4. Optimization

Now you have your keyword for a page. Pick out a main keyword or keyword phrase to a page. And you can also pick out a second keyword or keyword phrase – but no more for a page.

And now start your writing and on-page optimization. You can read much more about on page optimization here.

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Best regards, Henrik