SEO Basics: How to Develop Your Keyword Strategy

Keywords are the heart of your SEO strategy and should include individual words and phrases that your target clients would most likely use to locate your business. For example, if you’re a professional speaker and business consultant your keywords might look like this:

Professional speaker San Francisco

Professional speaker California

Professional speaker leadership

Leadership consulting

Business consulting leadership

Business consultant leadership

Leadership consultant San Francisco

Leadership consulting California

If you are targeting a local audience, including the city name in your keyword strategy is vitally important. If you serve surrounding cities, it’s a good idea to include those as well. Even if you want to reach a global audience, including a key phrase for your location can be beneficial if clients may look for that information. For example, I recently landed a paid speaking engagement because the client was looking for a speaker in California and found my site. If I had omitted that information, I would have missed that opportunity.

For ideas on which keywords to use for your business, try Google’s free keyword tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. When you type in a keyword or phrase here, Google shows you related phrases and their popularity in searches. This can be valuable information for helping you understand what your customers are looking for. Also, key phrases that are wildly popular are going to be harder to compete with. You may want to focus on incorporating key phrases with slightly less popularity and more of a niche focus.

For example, the key phrase “life coach” receives over 368,000 searches per month while “career life coach” receives 6,600. If you’re a coach specializing in careers, there’s still plenty of search traffic for your specialty, and it will likely be easier to show up in the search engines if you focus on that less popular search phrase.

Keywords work best when they match the content on your web page. So when writing your web copy, it’s best to repeat the most important keyword phrase throughout the page two or three times. If you want your page to come up when someone searches for “Dallas massage therapist,” then there should be several mentions of Dallas massage therapist throughout the text on the page. Also, when possible, use the keyword phrase in the heading and/or first paragraph of text. Google may not crawl all the way down each page, so the first two paragraphs are prime real estate.

Of course, there is a caveat to all of this. The search engines will penalize you if you try to beat the system. So don’t bother repeating keywords dozens of times—they will view this as keyword stuffing and it could actually hurt your ranking or get your site removed from the search engine altogether. Google does care about keyword density. Good keyword density should add up to 4% to 7% of the content on the page, with 93% of the page for other content.

Ultimately, what you want to do is develop a keyword map for your entire site. Each page should have its own unique set of keywords, which allows you to maximize the potential search traffic. This strategy also means that a standard five-page website is rarely enough. Your business probably offers a good number of services. If you want to increase the chances of being found in the search engines for numerous sets of keywords, the best way to do that is with numerous pages—one describing each service.

This is an excerpt from the book: Own Your Niche: Hype-Free Internet Marketing Tactics to Establish Authority in Your Field and Promote Your Service-Based Business by Stephanie Chandler. Struggling to build your audience online? You need this book!

Stephanie Chandler is the author of LEAP! 101 Ways to Grow Your Business.
She is also CEO of http://AuthorityPublishing.com, a custom publisher of
nonfiction books, and http://BusinessInfoGuide.com, a directory of resources
for entrepreneurs. Also visit http://StephanieChandler.com

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