KEYWORD STRATEGY

Picking the Right Keywords to Promote Is Critical

Before you go off and create your SEO and Back Links campaigns, make sure you are going after the right keywords. The biggest mistake we see is people going after keywords that are impossible to place well for.

Recently we had someone, who had just put up a brand new site, ask us to help him get a top placement for the term "credit cards". We told him forget it. Don't waste your time or your money.

	The Top 10 positions for Credit Cards are dominated by: americanexpress.com, bankrate.com, capitalone.com, chase.com, citicards.com, creditcards.com, discovercard.com, mastercard.com, visa.com
	There are 128 million competitors for this term, even if you use "credit cards"
	These sites have been around for 10-12 years. They have Page Ranks of 5-8 and have thousands of backlinks.
	In short - you can't beat them. Not without investing an enormous amount of time and money.

So what should he do if he can't go after the term Credit Cards - follow one critical rule - "Pick Battles You Can Win"

3 STEPS TO DOING WELL

In order to do well on the net:

1. Find a number of keyword phrases that have (a) a reasonable number of searches every month and (b) reasonable competition.

2. Make sure you have page pages optimized for EACH of these phrases - at the very least use an article or some kind of original content

3. Promote your home page AND each of these keyword focused pages.

So in the case of the client with the Credit Card site, we won't reveal what keywords we came up with, but we'll give you one he didn't use - military credit cards. It has 1,300 searches per month and only about 4,200 competitors using the exact keyword search ("military credit cards"). It should be easy to dominate.

Of course the term credit cards gets more searches per month. But so what - you can't get to the top anyway. Go find 10 or 20 more phrases like Military Credit Cards and build your traffic on keywords that you can dominate.

HERE IS AN EXAMPLE OF THE RESEARCH YOU SHOULD BE DOING

Let's say your site was about car parts - here's an analysis of some related keyword phrases:

Keyword Phrase	Searches Per Month	"Direct" Competition	Odds Against Success	Go or No	Comments
Used Parts	12,100	2,200,000	15,100		Impossible
Chevy Cars	22,000	146,000	2,280		Emphatically Not
Chevy Parts	18,100	642,000	1,650		Forget About It
Chevy Wheels	2,900	273,000	85		Probably a bit too hard
Chevy Dealerships	8,100	268,000	76		Probably a bit too hard
Chevy Blazer Parts	2,400	13,600	29		Will need a bit of promotion
Chevy Auto Parts	3,600	19,600	27		Should be do-able
Chevy Car Parts	2,400	18,200	20		Go For It!
Chevy Performance Parts	1,600	7,040	12		Should be a piece of cake
Nova Car Parts	14,800	1,890	3		An Incredible Winner
You are looking for keywords with a reasonable volume of searches every month, limited competition, and a green light - which means an excellent chance of success to get a keyword phrase listed in the Top 10 at Google.

KEYWORD ANALYSIS

The FREE Method

1. Use Google's Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) to find out the number of searches per month

2. Type your keyword phrase into Google with " quotation marks before and after the term - "golf equipment" - that will tell you the number of websites that have the exact phrase mentioned. In effect - this is the number of competing websites

3. If the number of "exact" search results is less than 30,000 the tem is relatively easy. If the number of search results is between 30,000 and 100,000 it is moderately difficult. If over 100,000 it is quite difficult. If the number is in the millions forget about it.

The PAID Method

Here is what we recommend: Micro Niche Finder

If you have any questions, please contact us for more information or call us at 250-882-1384

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