If you were to go to any web search engine and type in SEO Dallas you might find that there is some fierce competition for this particular keyword. It’s not surprising. Anybody that offers SEO services should show up in the search engines for keywords that pertain to what they offer. Otherwise, it might be a little hard to believe that they are actually experts.
Obtaining powerful search engine visibility is not as easy as some people might suspect. It requires a lot of planning and pushing to get high results. It takes a team of dedicated professionals to push websites to the top of the search engines – especially when there is a lot of competition for the keywords.
Why are Keywords Important?
The most important piece of the SEO puzzle is keywords. Anybody can assume what keywords will be best for what business, but unless you truly analyze the words that people actually use when they do searches, all you are doing is guessing. Guesswork does not even come close to true facts.
When people search for things on the internet they:
- Type in keywords
- Type in keyphrases
- Allow predictive text to finish queries
- Voice command searches
The way that the major search engines work is they base the query on the geolocation of the user, or the device of the user to produce local results that are most relevant to the search.
Here’s what to understand:
- Differences in variants of keywords
- Differences in phrases keywords are in
- Differences in tense of keywords
There can be a difference in search results when it comes to plural or singular versions of the keyword – depending on the competition in the market.
Regardless of the variants and phrases of the particular keyword, your pillar keywords are always going the be the most important. Keywords are what people use to find what they want on the internet. Search engines use keywords to display search results.
Keyword Research and Analysis
Finding the right keywords for the website is not as easy of a task as some might believe. Where we, ourselves, may refer to certain words when we search for items or information, other people will use other words or phrases that are not the same as ours.
For example, if a person is searching for shoes on the internet, they may specify the exact type of shoe they are looking for. Sneakers and high-heeled dress shoes are much different from each other.
If a website is offering a generalized selection of men’s women’s and children’s shoes the term “shoe” might be a great keyword to go after, but if the website is offering men’s or women’s shoes specifically. The keywords will have to be more specific.
- Determine specific keywords
- Define variants of keywords
- Research questions involving keywords
Finding the right keywords with different variations of the same word or phrase is key. Finding questions that people ask pertaining to the keywords is golden.
Search Volume
One of the greatest assets of keyword research is determining the search volume of specific keywords or phrases. One of the true ways to determine whether or not your keywords have any volume at all is if you type the words into the search engine you find suggestions of search queries.
Of course, some of the suggestions will be based on the history of your own searches, however, beyond the scope of your searches, search engines will provide options for users to choose as queries based on the volume of searches that come up in regards to the topic.
In any event, the real way to get an accurate vision of the search volume of a keyword is to use an SEO platform such as SEM Rush.
The search volume of a keyword is the number of searches involving the keyword in a query within a specified amount of time. For example, if there is a query for “iron horseshoes” 1,000 times within a month, the term “iron horseshoes” would have a search volume of 1,000.
You could break down the terms “iron” and “horseshoes” to see the volume for each term and use the term that fits what you are trying to rank for the most. If you are selling iron, you could use the iron search volume, if you are selling horseshoes, you would use the volume for “horseshoes” to make your decision.
The higher the search volume, the more people are actually searching the internet for those particular terms. The volume will give you an idea of what keywords will work best for the success of your website.
Keyword Difficulty
The factor of keyword difficulty will come into play as well when it is time to put your SEO plan into action. The percentage of difficulty for a keyword will be based on the search volume of the keyword, and the amount of competition that your keyword will have when trying to appear in search results.
The best way to gain momentum for a keyword is to start out with the less challenging versions of the keyword and work up to conquering the difficult ones.
Keep in mind that some of your competition will be huge websites like Amazon, Home Depot, Walmart, and eBay. The upside of this is that you may have a good chance at getting local results if you compete for that angle.
Keyword difficulty will determine how difficult your campaign will be:
- 100% Nearly impossible
- 80%-90% Extremely difficult
- 70%-80% Very difficult
- 60%-70% Challenging
- 50%-60% Difficult
- 40%-50% Doable
- 30%-40% Not difficult
- 20% – 10% Easy
The higher percent difficulties will need a large number of quality backlinks and hundreds of referring domains that have high domain authority.
Understand Your Battle
One thing that is a definite must in the world of SEO is to understand the market of the campaign. It does not mean you need to be an expert, you just have to understand what you are up against and the best ways to go about tackling challenges.
If your competition has a website with high domain authority, you have to get a high domain authority rating as well. This means you have to have an outreach to websites that are willing to allow you to post blogs or business information on them with links back to your site.
If you are not equipped to battle against websites that are stronger than yours, you may have to hire some experts to get you there.
On-Page SEO vs. Off-Page SEO
You can do all of the keyword research in the world to determine the best keywords for you, but if you don’t put what you have learned into action, it will not do any good. The strategies for off-page SEO and on-page SEO are similar, but completely different as well. In truth, you need both to be in effect for SEO to work at all.
On-page SEO has to do with the structure and content of the pages that are on the site where you want traffic to go. Some of the factors that lead to quality on-page strategies are:
- Keyword density
- Page title
- Page headings
- Meta description
- Geolocation
- Internal links
- External links
All of the pages of the website must be optimized for keywords that you would like to implement.
You can not merely “stuff” a bunch of keywords onto one page and expect it to be effective.
Off-page SEO is a strategy that involves off-site instances and links back to the website. Backlinks from blocks, ads or various articles are exceptionally helpful in the implementation of good off-page tactics.
Conclusion
With some planning and some teamwork, search engine results can become a dominating force for keywords. Finding the right keywords, then using creative and strategic methods to raise the importance of your website in the eyes of the search engines are for-sure ways to improve rankings and visibility.