SEO -How We Do It

Key Phrase Research

The second step in SEO is to choose the right key phrases to focus on.

The key phrase process involves multiple steps of refinement. This process starts by digging deeper into the products and services you offer and doing online research on them and the key phrases you believe are best. If your field is highly competitive we look closely at your competitors web sites source code to see who has done professional search engine optimization and who has not. Whether the key phrases they are focusing on are correct, or not its good to know what they have selected and what they are sticking with as the high conversion key phrases may not be ones you have considered.

After identifying the top 3 to 5 key phrases (depending on the type of optimization we're doing) and any supporting key phrases, we utilize a plethora of key phrase software solutions to come up with hundreds of potentially additional or supporting key phrases. These key phrases will be sorted and filtered by the amount of global, national and local traffic to them as well as the amount of competition there will be for those specific key phrases. These key phrases may be used to build on the main key phrases increasing relevancy or to grab additional traffic related to them. Choosing the right key phrases will often be influenced by the budget as well. Sometimes opting for "long tail" key phrases (Key phrases that are not generic) can keep the costs lower as there will be less competition to rank highly in the natural listings.

Example of a Generic Key Phrase: "Apple" (713,000,000 million results / competitors)

Example of a Focused Key Phrase: "Apple Tree" (204,000,000 million results / competitors)

Example of a Long Tail Key Phrase: " Fuji Apple Tree" (9,000,000 million results / competitors)

In the example above, if you want to rank highly for the word "Apple" the budget and time to implement SEO strategies to succeed will both be high. However if you want to rank for the key phrase "Fuji Apple Tree" it will be much less.

Choosing the optimal key phrases for search engine optimization is paramount as your entire web sites content and structure of the coding may need to be changed to persuade the search engines that you should be at the top of their rankings!