Our Keyword Selection Process: Initial Research
Once your account is set up, our SEO experts conduct extensive research on your keywords so we can select the right ones for your business. It’s the first step in doing what we do best—getting your website on the first page of Google!
Business
We examine your website and discover more about your business. Your input is very important to the success of your SEO campaign. Knowing what you do, why you do it, who your clientele is, and how you position your products/services gives us invaluable insight into selecting the right keywords.
Industry
We research your industry, compiling a list of keywords people search for within that industry to strongly position you against your competitors. Competitive research is also conducted and taken into account for possible gains in keyword positioning.
Region
We research search trends so we can craft regional keyword phrases that will drive as much traffic to your website as possible.
4 Stage Keyword Vetting Process
When research is complete, we’ll have a list of strong keywords for your campaign. To select the best keywords from that list, we put each keyword through a rigorous system of testing and scoring in four key categories.
SEO campaigns typically don’t reach the first page within six months because of the following reasons:
- Insufficient budget — there was not enough budget allocated to fund the amount of work required to move to page one within six months.
- Clients choose unrecommended keywords — rather than relying on our expertise and experience to guide them.
- Clients stop communication — they are unresponsive and miss out on important recommended optimizations we ask them to approve.
Before a client is educated on keyword strategy, they often suggest keywords that have too much competition, or have poor searcher intent. Many clients believe that casting a wider net and choosing broad keywords will result in more traffic to their website. Although this could be true for certain digital marketing strategies, with SEO the opposite is true; the more specific the keywords, the better chance they’ll have landing on the first page of Google.
According to a study of over 5 million data points by Backlinko in 2019, 99% of searchers never go beyond the first page of Google’s results. If you aren’t on the first page, you don’t exist to most searchers. This is why it is so important to choose keywords that have the best chance of landing on the first page of Google.
We have SEO performance data from over 115K small business accounts. While our clients always have a choice in what keywords we target, we’ve identified exactly what makes our keyword recommendations the best.
Setting Expectations
The biggest reason businesses rank for highly competitive keywords is they often have years of history optimizing for them. Clients who wish to overtake their top ranking competitors need to do more to build their trust and relevance with Google, which takes time; even more so if your client has a smaller budget.
For local campaigns, we build your client’s presence in their physical location before expanding their reach to surrounding areas. Google won’t recommend a business outside their searcher’s area if that business isn’t trusted in their own circle of influence first.
Our SEO clients are incredibly successful ranking online because we advise them to avoid going after the most highly competitive keywords in their industry or region—at least at first. We target keywords that have the most realistic chance to succeed and build Google’s trust in the quickest and most effective way possible.