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About Keyword Research

To build a foundation for all website services, especially for SEO copywriting, you'll need to put some effort into keyword research and analysis.

You'll want to take the time to brainstorm what keyword terms and search phrases your target website visitors are likely to use. On existing sites, you can take advantage of your site's stats to check referrer strings. Which terms and phrases are most popular for your site?
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There are two important elements of keyword research - frequency and competition. The balance between the two is known as Keyword Effectiveness or Keyword Efficiency, resulting in the KEI acronym.

Keyword Frequency

You certainly wouldn't want to spend a lot of time and money targeting keywords and phrases that no one is likely to use in a search. It's very possible, that your past website promotion and SEO efforts have focused on the wrong keywords and that's why you're not seeing the kind of website traffic you'd like to see. It's very easy for SEO firms to claim credit for great rankings on keyword phrases that are never used in search. On the other side of the coin, it's very difficult to rank for keywords that are too generic, such as "soup" or "t-shirts". Therefore, effective keyword selection requires balancing and a dose of reality.

Keyword Competition or Competitiveness

When it comes to keyword competition or "competitiveness", the more sites that are competing for ranking against your targeted keyword phrase, the more difficult it will be to attain top rankings. For example, if a search on Google returns 80 million results for your keyword phrase, that phrase is likely to be much tougher to get top rankings for than a phrase that yields only 7,000 results.

Ranking in the top 10 search results for highly competitive keywords can be done - with extensive effort at considerable expense over a long period of time. Most clients don't have the patience or budget for such intense SEO campaigns. A better solution for many clients is to focus on "long tail" keywords.

Long Tail Keywords

The long tail theory is best illustrated by example. While a Las Vegas car dealer may get a substantial amount of website traffic if he or she launched a very expensive SEO campaign to rank for the generic term "cars". Ranking well for that term might result in thousands of website visitors each day. A very small percentage of those visitors, however, would convert to sales because many of the visitors wouldn't be able to get to the Las Vegas area, weren't looking for a lease, or couldn't afford to lease a Porsche 911 in the first place. All that traffic wouldn't be doing much good for the car dealer's business, would it? But what if the dealer's most profitable offering was lease agreements on Porsche 911's? As you might imagine, the frequency of search for a keyword phrase as specific as "Porsche 911 leasing Las Vegas" would be much lower.

However, the conversion rate - the percentage of searchers who found the dealer in a search, clicked on the search result to visit the site and then actually signed a lease with this dealer would be much higher than the conversion rate for "cars".

The long tail of search theory suggests that when you add up all the visitors who found the site using more specific terms would, in the long run, outnumber the traffic from searchers who used the more competitive and generic term "cars". Most websites rank well for long tail keywords without even trying. Ranking well for these terms is like picking low-hanging fruit and it can pay off over the long run. That's why should include some long tail keywords in your website strategy. Would you rather have a million visitors per day to your website with only 4 who became customers, or 50 visitors per day, of who 12 became customers?

Let Us Help with Keyword Research

Keyword research is something we'd rather not do alone. We need your help, since you know your business, your target market and your competitors best. We'll look at your existing keywords and strongly encourage you to make suggestions. In the course of our keyword research we'll uncover a number of keyword phrases you may not have thought of. We'll suggest those to you if we think you should focus on them for best conversion results and the best return on your investment.

However, keyword research is an activity that can be performed anywhere for anyone. AgrFriends.com provides top-notch website services to clients across the USA and around the world.

Contact This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it today for your marketing communications needs. You'll be glad you did!