There are two critical facets to any SEO or SEM campaign (1) the keywords you target and (2) how effective they are for producing tangible sales, leads, opt-ins or their desired conversion objective.
Which keyword will hook the best consumer?
Keyword Selection is the Cornerstone of Conversion
Diversifying your keyword and ranking strategy is imperative for (1) targeting phrases within your budget and (2) building a solid foundation through using relevant co-occurrence while your website develops authority. Put simply, this means targeting enough phrases within a cluster of overlapping keywords that search engines interpret your website as an authority on the topic.
While you might want to rank for the most coveted keyword in the market, unless you cultivate your website by (a) implementing a top down site architecture for those keywords (b) add relevant supporting content to create reinforcement from the bottom up (c) structure efficient and relevant internal links and (4) developing authoritative inbound links from other websites, then competitive keywords are not the best selection as initial targets for conversion and ROI.
The secret to a strong ranking strategy is to find keywords with high-demand and low competition. This allows you to gain traction and generate traffic for relevant terms while you collectively chip away at the competitive root phrases over time until they are ranked.
A Simple, Effective Ranking Strategy:
- Pick a root phrase.
- Create a silo/primary landing page for that keyword (using exact match titles, url and h1 tags).
- Link to that page from every page in the primary navigation from theme relevant /related pages.
- Link contextually to that page from (a) supporting articles and (b) other strong silo landing pages using the same primary keyword used in the title, url and h1 (to reinforce the pages theme).
- Build supporting articles nested in a category that supports the topic of the silo/primary landing page.
- Once ranked, go back and edit the page to make sure it links to other new landing pages to augment their elevation into the top 10 results as well as provides a contextual link to your most competitive keywords landing page (to provide support from within).
Targeting Keywords Within Reach
The more competitive the keyword, the longer it takes to see results. There is a light at the end of the tunnel when you hit page one for those keywords, but in the meantime the fact is that over 70% or of most website traffic comes from the long-tail of search (key phrases with 3 or more words). The more words in the query, the less competitive it becomes.
This means that if you broaden the range of keywords used to entice consumers through using synonyms and supporting modifiers to change the flavor of intent, using modifiers such as best, reviews, leading, cheap, affordable, discount, wholesale, for sale, etc. and tack those before or after your keyword, you can often double conversions for competitive root phrases.
Once your website develops more authority, what once was considered a competitive keyword shifts. In other words, scope is relevant to the presence your website cultivates as a result of the supporting content or inbound links are vouching for its authority/credibility.
While under the present circumstance while a keyword with 1,000,000 competing may be difficult now, as your website grows stronger you can rank for keywords in hours, days or weeks compared to months as a side effect of the authority produced from the synergy or page and domain level authority.
Work Smarter Not Harder:
- Focus on keywords within your reach.
- Focus on sales conversions as much as rankings
- Blanket a market by consolidating 3 keywords per landing page and cross linking the various landing pages to provide ranking factor (like the buddy system) to other page/candidates.
- Build the most competitive keywords into the site architecture and scale the websites relevance using supporting semantically relevant supporting articles (based on keywords with proven search volume).
- As your website gains strength, traction and authority, raise the bar and devour more competitive keywords.
Most websites need 300-600 pages before the algorithm detects the gravity of the website (this depends on the market and competition). However, more pages mean more pagerank, more potential internal links and more potential pages to build links to which can augment the more competitive keywords targeted.
While conversion and traffic go hand in hand, the keywords you use to entice that traffic needs to hook the best candidate for conversation.
For additional information, download our ebook “Organic Search Top Keyword Modifiers” or follow the links below to other useful posts.
- SEO Tips to Acquire Competitive Keywords
- 10 SEO Tips to Triple Keyword Visibility
- Which Type of Keywords are best for SEO?
- Aligning Keywords and Landing Pages
- Targeting Behavioral Keywords
To cut to the chase, Sue Bell from ThemeZoom has done it once again giving away insider SEO tips on using The Last Keyword Tool on how to pick thematically relevant supporting articles and apply them to your silo site architecture.
After you read this and the other resources linked here, take in the video to cement the collective topic of keywords, traffic and conversion.
Enjoy!
I believe it all starts with the main theme keyword, then builds on what you have as your category keywords from your market research
Hi Jeffrey,
I don’t want to go off topic here so could I ask you to please take a look at my recent comment/question on an older post of yours when you have a minute?
thanks!
Kevin
link below…
https://seodesignsolutions.com/blog/how-to-reference-material/how-to-theme-and-silo-your-wordpress-blog/comment-page-1/#comment-75843
finding buying keyword phrases is the real key
Thanks for these tips. I wondcer what would be the characteristics for a keyword a person could rank for within a week with a brand new domain name.