Keywords are the fundamentals to all search engine optimisation campaigns and therefore it is vital that you choose the right ones. The important factors to consider are search volumes and competiveness. An effective SEO campaign will target keywords that are achievable and deliver a good level of search traffic.

If you target a keyword that is too competitive, you are unlikely to achieve first page rankings and therefore will not receive much search traffic. Likewise, if you pick easy keywords with little search volume, you will be at the top of the search engines for a keyword that is never search for. So how do you go about getting the correct balance?

It is advisable to use keyword tools to understand search volumes as there is no point spending time and money on SEO if the search traffic is not there. A great free tool is Google’s Keyword Tool. All you need is a Google log in.

Google Keyword Tool
Google’s keyword tool allows you to type in certain keyword phrases or your website URL and it will generate keyword ideas, detailing their search volume. It is advisable to select the exact match option rather than broad match as this will then give you more accurate figures because broad match will include results for similar searches and distort figures. The table can be downloaded to csv and analysed in more depth. It is advisable at this stage to delete all irrelevant keywords.

You now have a list of relevant keywords relating to your website with search volumes. You just need to understand the competitiveness for each keyword so you can make a decision on which keywords to target. The competition column that is included with Google’s keyword tool will give you an idea but this is designed for Google AdWords and not SEO and is not always very accurate and therefore it is best to do your own competition analysis.

Number of Search Results
The main factors to consider when looking at the competitiveness of each keyword are the number of competitors and how optimised the websites are for that keyword. We will look at the number of competitors by looking at the number of search results which is shown below the search bar in Google. To see how many pages of results there are, type in &start=990 into the URL. This will take you to the last page of results. Anything less than 500 pages is good.

Onsite SEO
We now need to look at how much the competition has optimised for the search results. First of all we shall look for onpage search engine optimisation by typing intitle:”keyword”. This will tell you the number of results with your keyword in the URL. As a guide, anything less than 25000 is good. To find out how many pages have keywords in the title, type in intitle:”keyword”. Again, anything below 25000 is good.

Number of Links
The final thing to consider is the number of links the competitors have. A good free tool to use is Open Site Explorer. Type in the URL of the company at the bottom of page 1. Under 1000 links is good but remember this is only a guide as obviously certain links carry more weight than others.
Sort Results and choose keywords

Using Excel, do a multiple column sorts and sort search volume highest to lowest and the other factors lowest to highest.