Niche keyword selection – part art, part science.

For many businesses, keyword selection is a confusing process. Possibly because most businesses are multi-facetted and no one term adequately covers all that it has to offer.

How do you best tell the search engines what such a complex offer is about so they send the right visitors to your site?

You may be a coach, but your offer is not just business coaching. It involves a particular method, or you have brought a very personalized spin to it.

Perhaps you are an accountant, and tax minimization is your specialty, but you also provide a very personal service, which includes book-keeping.

How about a not-for-profit whose contributors are world wide, whose currency is knitted squares and whose beneficiaries are African orphans?

Good search engine optimization is dependent on your keyword selection.

Lets re-examine the reasons why you should be involved in niche keyword research in the first place.

1. There is little point in being online unless you website is found by your most desired visitor.

2. Search engines drive traffic to sites based on a number of complex algorithms. A starting point for these, is the keywords resident in the meta-tags, meta-description and in the content on your site, which is indexed in terms of its relevancy to the visitors’ search terms.

3. Good valuable content is essential to satisfy the requirements of both type of visitors to your site; human and search engine ‘spiders’ and ‘bots’.

4. Your spider visitors need to judge what your site is about and how relevant it is by the keywords and keyword phrases you use in your content, all of which need to be relevant to your niche keywords.

5. Human visitors need to be satisfied that the site the search engines have sent them to answers their question, solves their problem or delivers them the product they are after.

6. All of this is roughly but 20 percent of the equation and is referred to as on-page optimization.

7. Get this part right and the other 80 percent, referred to as off-page optimization becomes merely mechanical.

This begins to illustrate the importance of your niche keyword(s). How do you find the ones that best suit your offer which at the same time are not competitive (ie lots of other businesses are competing for the same keywords)?

This is not an overnight exercise. Keyword selection is part art, part science.

A great starting point is to let your passion for your business inform you.
– What are the terms you would use to best describe what you do?
– Write these words down.
– Key them into the search bar of your internet browser. What is returned?
– Are the top three sites, relevant to what you do?
– Are they your natural competitors?

Use the Google keyword tool and put your terms in there. What other terms come up? Do they describe what your business is about? How many searches are there for these words? How many other sites rank for the terms? (ie how competitive are the terms?)

Enter similar business website ‘urls’ into the keyword tool. What search terms are in line with what you do?

Once you have gone through this sifting process and sat on it for while, you will be amazed at how the right niche keywords start to emerge. There is a more rigorous research that ought to be done before you start applying this keyword selection to the meta data and content on your site, but getting a feel for your niche keywords is a good place to start.

To watch the video on starting the keyword selection process using the Google Keyword tool, click here.