This is a complex and very controversial question that goes to the heart of that term everyone is talking about but hardly anyone understands, “Digital transformation”.
Unless you have done it this year, I would strongly recommend getting an outsider to facilitate developing your digital strategy from the ground up, even if you end up in the same place. In fact that would be a perfect outcome. Not to do it at the current time in the climate we are in is a very risky decision.
So why do I need a Digital Strategy to choose some keywords?
If you are confident about where your business is headed you don’t. Since strategy is not the subject of this post, Ill assume form here on that you are very confident about who you are and where you are going. Write it down succinctly, write down in a sentence or two, why as a result of the previous sentence, customers seek you out and do business with you. If you are not comfortable with this strategy development, just hire someone for a day or two to facilitate.
Still happy? Great.
Now list the three strongest competitors you face. Write a similar sentence about who they are and why customers seek them out and buy form them..
Now ask yourself, are you positioning your business and your offerings the he best advantage?
Is there anything you ought to change a little to improve your share of that pie. Once you have made your decision you are ready to go.
Use commercial keyword research tools to extract from your site and your competitor site the organic keywords that produce the most traffic. Also make some calculations to see which ones produce the most revenue, it’s not always a perfect correlation.
A great way to do competitive and keyword analysis is to get a snapshot report. The first one is free and it will open your eyes
Start Optimising
Now compare your prime keywords to those of competitors and see which ones your are competing with them on. Also analyse these keywords to see what is being used in PPC campaigns and which of these seem to be producing the best returns there..
Make a decision on which keywords you should be adding to your list and which ones you need to compete harder on with a specific goal in mind. Don’t try for the impossible. Choose words where you don’t have a mountain to climb. One method id to look for a KEI index that measures difficulty or another similar index ad of course you have made sure that financially they are worth the effort.
Now you have a list of the keywords that are worth focusing on you have prioritised it. Next you just have to decide on the best way to go about optimising for these keywords.
The perfect approach changes constantly as algorithms change so it is always going to be wise to do some searching and reading, make sure the articles are fairly recent. Typically you wont want to be promoting more than one primary keyword per page, but you ca have smaller numbers of a second and third closely related word. Keep your instances of the keyword close to the top of the page and include it in headings, alt tags and links.
Next you will want to write some blog pages that also contain the keyword and post these blogs on social media sites so that you have back-links and social signals. You may want to try for some other contextual back-links if you are able.
To climb the rankings can take a lot of time a lot of traffic and a lot of back-links and social signals, but you have to start somewhere and of course its ultimately about the competition. You only need make it to the visible part of the SERP.