Part of the recipe I’m calling inbound marketing involves optimizing your content. So let’s delve into how to optimize your website, blog, and even your social media content: identify your keywords (keyword can also refer to a phrase).  You should research to identify the best 7 or 8 keywords that virtually all of your content will contain and use as their primary focus.  My role as a marketing strategy consulting professional is to help businesses use SEO and a variety of other tools to grow their businesses.  The most basic level of marketing strategy involves finding focus and this exercise helps with both SEO strategy and finding focus.

When you are already in business, and I imagine most people reading this will be in this situation, you are going to be starting out with an existing list of keywords developed out of the nature of your existing business that will be possible candidates for 7 or 8 magic words.  By magic, I mean words that fit some very specific criteria.  They should be relevant to your business, lend themselves easily to building content, provide enough search traffic to make it worth your time to optimize for them, have a decent percentage of marketing value and finally the competition for these words needs to be within certain parameters.

Sit yourself down and start hammering out this list and don’t feel pressured to do it in one or two sittings.  This is an important, foundational step and it should get a lot of attention.  Whether or not you put much stock in SEO, this exercise will benefit you in other ways.  It will help you zero in all of your marketing efforts so that everything you produce is centered around a central theme or message using these words as the focal point.  You will need a very long list.  Be sure to include phrases, locality words – everything you can possibly think of that someone might use to find your business online.

Now you’re going to test these words to uncover their value.  You must test them for broad match – typing the words into a search engine without quotes which finds them in any order anywhere on the page, and also for phrase match, the exact phrase, typed inside quotation marks.  This is a tedious process if you do it manually, on your own, so my advice is to find a professional to help you with your SEO.  Make sure the service you choose will do the steps I’ll unpack for you here and hold them accountable by asking for this data as part of the package of services you purchase.

Here is what you want to find out about each word.  Are there enough people searching for it each day to make it worth the time to build related content with it?  The threshold for acceptable traffic will vary from one type of business to the next since there is a wide variance in demand for products and services.  A good general benchmark is 30-60 searches/day on products with a reasonable profit margin, much higher if the profit margin is somewhat low per sale since you will need to produce more sales to make using this word worthwhile.  I use software that generates this data for me – plug in the keywords one at a time and analyze them for these criteria and that is my recommendation to you if you want to try to tackle this yourself.

If it passes the traffic volume test move on to commercial value.  What is the likelihood a person searching with this phrase or word is seeking to buy something?  High probability = pass, low probability = fail, no point in putting a lot of effort into words that generate traffic that isn’t intent on making a purchase if your ultimate goal is to generate sales.  As with the above criteria, a software tool can produce this result for you and most SEO professionals use software so make certain you request this particular piece of data of any professional who will help you with this process.

Your word passes the traffic volume and commercial value test so now you want to know if there are a lot of websites already optimizing for this word.  There are 3 levels of keywords here: Market level words, that is words that over 100,000 websites appear in search results for, Niche level which are somewhere above 30K and under 100K sites, and finally micro-niche level words. Micro-niche level words have 30K or less websites appearing in search results and this is the goal we’re shooting for as the 3rd test to pass.

Now you see why researching keywords manually will be a mind-numbing process.  Putting each of your words through this test cycle, eliminating those that don’t fit the bill (which will very likely be most of them) to narrow down the list. Again, software gets the job done much faster and a good SEO outsource partner will be able to provide this service.  Expect it to be a significant investment since this is hours of work when done properly.

This is a tedious process, especially now that the online world is getting very crowded with competition for pretty much everything.  When you are aiming at local or regional business this can help since your keyword phrase can now be specific to a location and help get that competition to a manageable level (Google has added locality search which will also help).  It can also knock the phrase out of your list if people aren’t searching by locality since the traffic will be lower for that keyword or phrase.

Finally, if all of your best efforts reveal you are in a market level or niche level realm of competition, go ahead and optimize for these words but don’t expect Google and search engines to provide much in the way of site traffic for you. Use them instead to stay focused and keep your marketing messages crystal clear.  In this case you will target social media much more heavily and drive the traffic through some methods I’ll cover in detail in future posts.

If all of this sounds horrifying, the good news is there is plenty of help arriving on the scene. Choose very carefully who will take your marketing efforts online since many are hopping into this arena but few are fully versed on inbound marketing methods.  Contact me for a free consultation and some direction in selecting an outsource partner.  I am a collaborative marketing strategy consulting partner with Hip Brand Group and a certified inbound marketing professional.

For more step by step help see the How 2 category of blog posts and sign up for my monthly email updates for more help and information delivered straight to your inbox.