Not all SEO agencies are the same, but chances are, you already know that. In an every changing industry, it’s important for SEO experts to stay on their toes while abiding by search engine guidelines. Most recently, Google Penguin update detected websites using black hat SEO techniques and bumping them off of first page. There are many different things you can do to make sure your SEO work is effective and more importantly, abiding by Google’s guidelines.
Use Free Keyword Tools
It’s very true that SEO experts see things differently. As experienced experts in internet marketing, it’s important to think like consumers. Actually, like a number of consumers. It’s definitely shown that not everyone “works” search engines the same. What you may be thinking, your neighbor may not be. Doing research and analytic reports for a wedding venue client of ours shows just that. For example, you may be thinking to search for “wedding venues” and as Google AdWords Keyword Tool shows, there are roughly 1,830,000 global monthly searches for that.
However, although it may not be grammatically correct, “weddings venue” is a highly searched term as well, yielding just under 100,000 global monthly searches. You will also see many more related searches that Google suggests based on your keywords.
As the wedding venue owner, you might not even think to research “weddings venue” because, well, frankly, it doesn’t make sense. Enter, SEO experts. We try to think like consumers. One of the first steps in an SEO campaign is to conduct keyword research. It’s important to use a variety of keywords, synonyms, word combinations, slang terms, misspellings and other mixtures to figure out what works best and which word combinations have the most search.
We discovered the same thing for another client of ours in the education industry. It was interesting to learn what you think students would search compared to what they are actually searching. It took keyword research to show popular terms within the test prep industry, but it’s the long-tail keywords that bring viable leads. For example, New York City high school students are searching for “sat test prep nyc” or “sat tutor manhattan.”
Further Considerations for Keywords
After deep analysis of keywords and choosing areas to focus on, developing appropriate corresponding webpages filled with keyword-rich content is important. Because search engine ranking competition is fierce, it’s important that your website supports your target areas. Search engine are constantly crawling websites for answers to searchers questions (or searches). Chances are, if you don’t have a content-rich website that Google can interpret, you won’t be appearing on page 1 or even 2 of search results.
From there, it’s an SEO experts job to update on-page SEO features, build credible backlinks, promote your content on web 2.0 platforms and help Google take notice of your website. SEO is a constant battle and requires frequent attention.