If you know anything at all about Internet marketing, you know that traffic is the lifeblood of your business. Moreover, getting free traffic from search engines is an excellent opportunity for any entrepreneur with a limited budget. Instead of breaking the bank with huge pay-per-click advertising campaigns, you can focus on recurring traffic from potential customers who are actually searching for your products and services.
The first step is, of course, to build a comprehensive list of possible keyword phrases that your potential customers would be searching for. From here, you can go into a more detailed analysis of the search volume and competition.
The critical step would be to choose which keyword phrases you wish to target as part of your overall search engine optimization plan. If you are planning to build a huge authority website with thousands of pages over the next few years, then it might be feasible to gradually include every keyword phrase on your website (even if this ended up being thousands of phrases).
Most people, however, are not planning this kind of formidable endeavor, and chances are that you are focusing on building a small niche website or at least a medium-sized with anywhere from a few pages to a few dozen pages total.
With this in mind, you need to begin choosing your keyword phrases based on a combination of high search volume and low competition. Obviously, the more search volume a particular keyword has, the more competition there will likely be. So you simply have to find a balance.
Search volume is a pretty easy thing to understand, and most keyword tools will give you an idea of how many people are searching for a phrase on either a daily basis or on a monthly basis. But how do you determine the competition? After all, it’s critical to understand the competition levels when doing your keyword research or you could end up going after hopelessly difficult keyword phrases. Unless you’re in it for the very long haul, there’s no use going after phrases that involve government websites or Fortune 500 companies (and in fact you might never rank for these kinds of keyword phrases).
One way to determine the competition is to simply put the keyword phrase into Google inside quotation marks. This will give you the number of competing websites that have the exact keyword phrase on the webpage. This will give you a starting point, but unfortunately this is not very accurate. There are some terms that have low competing pages (like below 30,000), but those sites on the first page are well-established authority websites. Therefore, it is better to take a look at the PageRank and backlinks for the top 10 websites ranking in Google in order to evaluate any particular keyword phrase.