Today we are going to talk about the basics of keyword selection and how it affects your online marketing campaigns.

Possibly the most important part of any keyword selection is understanding your business, your customer’s needs and their expectations on visiting your website.

It is of a very little point in having lots of traffic to the site but very little conversion into leads, inquiries, subscriptions or sales, but also the alternative is, that you don’t also want to be picking phrases that are so niche that nobody is actually going to be searching for them.  What you are looking for are keywords that are commonly searched and are also related to your business’s products or services.

There are quite a few good keyword tools that you can use to help you analyze your keywords, many are on a cost basis, so we would recommend that you first start with Google Keyword Planner, formerly known as Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool as it provides the data in a basic understandable form, provides alternative keyword suggestions and is free to use.

https://adwords.google.com/ko/KeywordPlanner/

Follow the link above to the Keyword Planner, do note that you will need to sign in to access this tool.

The data can be downloaded into Excel, then you can move it around and make better sense of which keywords may well be better for you to focus upon.

Google also offers a series of search links that allow you to check the competitiveness of your preferred keywords.

If you go to Google.co.uk, Google.com.au or any Google site and type in “allinanchor: the keyword” then hit search, this will bring up a series of visuals that show you the incoming links for a keyword. You can also do this with “allintitle:” and “allintext:”

Another option is to drop us a line here at Havoc Digital and ask for a complimentary Keyword Market Analysis and we will send it to you without obligation. email:

Okay.  So we have the data and information on our keywords now.  We have the search volume and we can use the auto link to find our online competition.

Keyword Selection – Equation

Now we can do an equation to find the KOI or Keyword Opportunity Index so the equation is quite simple, and it’s just search volume squared divided by the DC or direct competition.

This means, if something has a high search volume and low direct competition, I will have a high KOI.  So if you use a spreadsheet, put all your keywords in a spreadsheet, find out the KOIs.

You can then finalize your keywords by using a bit of common sense and picking the ones with the high KOI and a low DC or direct competition.

Armed with this information you can also check out Google.com/Trends, enter your keywords in that.  For example, if you did something like “Christmas card,” you’d see that it’s a seasonal keyword; it’s only searched for in November and December.  This will give you the insight to start your marketing campaign for “Christmas card” by August so that you are ranking when your potential customers are looking to buy.

If you are watching this on Havoc Digital’s blog or YouTube.com/havocdigital666, subscribe or ask us a question via email or the comments section below and we will get back to you with an answer. email:

Thanks for reading this.

Ben Miranda