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Keyword Difficulty
The wise choice of the right keywords you will optimize for
is the first and crucial step to a successful SEO campaign.
If you fail on this very first step, the road ahead is very
bumpy and most likely you will only waste your (or your
client's) money and time. There are many ways to determine
which keywords to optimize for and usually the final list of
them is made after a careful analysis of what the online
population is searching for, which keywords have your
competitors chosen and above all - which are the keywords
that you feel describe your site best. All of this is great
and certainly this is the way to go but if you want to
increase your chances of success, additional research is
never too much, especially when its results will save you
the shots in the dark.
Dreaming High - Shooting the Top-Notch Keywords?
After you have made a long and detailed list of all the
lucrative keywords that are searched by tens of thousands a
day, do not hurry yet. It is great that you have chosen
popular keywords but it would be even greater if you have
chosen keywords for which top positioning is achievable with
reasonable effort. If you have many competitors for the
keywords you have chosen, chances are, no matter how hard
you try, that you will hardly be able to overtake them and
place your site amongst the top ten results. And as every
SEO knows, if you can't be on the first page (or on the
second and in the worst case on the third one) of the
organic search results, you'd better think again if the
potential gain from optimization for those particular words
is worth the effort. It is true that sometimes even sites
that are after the first 50 results get decent traffic from
search engines but it is certain that you can't count on
that. And even if you somehow manage to get to the top, do
you have any idea what it will take to keep the good
results?
You can feel discouraged that all lucrative keywords are
already occupied but it is too early to give up. Low-volume
search keywords can be as lucrative as the high-volume ones
and their main advantage is that you will have less
competition. The SEO experts from Blackwood Productions
confirm that it is possible with less effort and within
budget to achieve much better results with low-volume search
keywords than if you targeted the high-volume search ones.
In order to do this, you need to make an estimate about how
difficult it would be to rank well for a particular keyword.
Get Down to Earth
The best way to estimate how difficult it would be to rank
well for a particular keyword is by using the appropriate
tools. If you search the Web, you will see several keyword
difficulty tools. Choose a couple of them, for instance
Seochat's Keyword Difficulty Tool, Cached's Keyword
Difficulty Tool and Seomoz's Keyword Difficulty Tool and off
we go. The idea behind choosing multiple tools is not that
you have so much free time that you need to find a way to
waste it. If you choose only one tool, you will finish your
research faster but having in mind the different results
that each tool gives, you'd better double check before you
start the optimization itself. The Seomoz's tool is a kind
of complicated and if you want to use it you need to make
several registrations but it is worth the trouble (and the
patience - while you wait for the results to be calculated).
You may also want to check for several keywords or keyword
phrases. You will be surprised to see how different the
estimated difficulty for similar keywords is! For instance,
if you are optimizing a financial site, which deals mainly
with credits and loans, and some of your keywords are
finance, money, credit, loan, and mortgage, running a check
with the seochat's Keyword Difficulty Tool produces results
like these (the percentages are rounded but you get the
idea): finance - 89%, money - 76% credit - 74% loan - 66%
mortgage - 65%.
It seems that the keyword finance is very tough and since
your site is targeted at credits and loans and not on stock
exchange or insurance, which are also branches of finance,
there is no need to cry over the fact that it is very
difficult to compete for the finance keyword.
The results were similar with the second tool, though it
does not give percentages but uses a scale starting from
Very Easy to Very Difficult. I did not check all the results
with the third tool, because it seems that the seomoz report
on keyword difficulty for a particular word needs ages to be
compiled but the results were similar, so it becomes clear
that it is more feasible to optimize for mortgage and loan,
rather than for the broader term finance.
You may want to bookmark some of these tools for future use
as well. They will be very useful to monitor possible
changes on the keyword difficulty landscape. After you have
optimized your site for the keywords you have selected,
occasionally check again the difficulty of the keywords you
are already optimizing for because the percentages are
changing over time and if you discover that the competition
for your keywords has increased, make some more efforts to
retain the gained positions.
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