How to Choose the Best Keywords for Local SEO

One of the things we do early on with a new search engine optimization (SEO) client is help them develop a list of keywords that they would want to optimize for their website. Usually we keep the list to around 15-20 keywords to start with. The list of SEO keywords are the words/phrases that we want the site to come up for in Google, Yahoo and Bing when a user does a search. For some sites this isn't as easy as one would think.

For some sites, like an eCommerce website, there might be a number of different products and services that may be offered and 15-20 keywords won't cover them all. Good SEO however goes after the keywords with the most revenue/traffic potential and when done properly you often end up optimizing dozens of additional keywords when you correctly optimize your 15-20 keywords.

Another challenge with coming up with a good SEO keyword list is how to localize your SEO. Usually the best way to do this is to add a geographic keyword to your SEO phrase. For example, if I was optimizing my site for the keyword phrase 'website design' and I wanted customers in my area I would most likely optimize for 'Denver website design' as well as other local city names or in some cases state names. I found however that there tends to be a lot more city name searches than state names but most users use the general metro city name rather than the actual city name. Also, don't forget about doing different ordering of the words in your keyword phrase. For example, 'website design Denver' and 'website design in Denver' will yield different search results so you may want to optimize for one or more combination.

One of the biggest challenges with SEO is finding the right keywords. Ultimately you not only want keywords that match your business but you also want to optimize for keywords with a higher search volume and lower competition. Unless you have the tools to get these numbers that can be a challenge. Pixo can help you with finding the right keywords. The results can be surprising at times when you put a keyword into a tool that tells you the competition and search volume for a keyword. Sometimes you find that a keyword that you would have thought would have been great to optimize for gets no search volume or has tons of competition. Getting the right local keywords early on can save you time and money in the long run. By using some sophisticated tools you can find holes in Google where you can more quickly rise to page #1 and start driving traffic to your website.

If you would like to learn about our SEO services click here. Or if you would just like to ask a question about search engine optimization drop us a note. We would be happy to help you sort through your options for local SEO.