Keyword selection is the most important step in optimizing your website for search engines

Choosing the right "keywords" is vital to get your website ranked on major search engines. Choose the wrong keywords and all efforts to boost your ranking after this will be wasted.

The reason for keyword analysis is to discover what your target customers are keying into search engines like Google when they are looking for the products or services that you offer. Just taking wild guesses and hoping for the best doesn't cut it.

Many businesses come unstuck in their online marketing because the words and phrases they THINK their prospects are typing in aren’t accurate.

Keyword analysis should be part of any search engine marketing effort

Picking the best keywords can make a huge difference in the overall success of your search engine marketing campaign. Establishing a list of relevant targeted keywords is fundamental, and I strongly recommend that keyword analysis be a part of any search engine marketing effort.

Brainstorming to choose keywords

The first step towards choosing the right keywords is brainstorming. This needs to be done to generate the broadest possible list of keywords for your web site. Before you begin focusing on keyword popularity, you need to think outside the box and develop a good list of keywords.

It helps to get a few people involved with this to get a wider range of perspectives, and to come up with good words that may be overlooked. When we get to the detailed analysis phase we establish a detailed keyword ranking based on each word's search popularity and relevance.

Take this site as an example. Our key word list for a site like this may be as follows, web, web site, website, design, designers, agency, studio, company, firm, and so on. The list can get very long.

The primary keywords we eventually chose for this site are "Web Designers Thailand". While this may seem obvious, why not "Web Site Designers Thailand", or "Website Designers Thailand"? We could have focused on the area we are in and instead of the country chosen "Chiang Mai", so why didn't we?

We spent a lot of time doing in-depth keyword analysis and found that the simple phrase "Web Designers Thailand" was used by more people doing searches than any other, but this is not the end of the story!

International spelling & common misspellings

Should we spell optimize with a "z" or should it be optimise with an "s"? What about jewelry... or should that be jewellery? These are completely different words as far as search engines are concerned. There are many instances where there are no "correct" ways to spell a certain word, but you must find out which is being used by Internet users most.

You may also consider common misspellings too. Is "accomodation" correct, or should it be "accommodation"? It may sound strange if you are not American, but the word "accomodations" is actually used a lot too.

However, accomodation is not a word. It is a very common misspelling of the word, accommodation, but it is used by at least as many people when looking for somewhere to stay using Google.

A keyword analysis is essential to help you make informed decisions about which is the best to use on your site. Without this all you can do is guess.

The next step - Competitor Analysis

Once a list of keywords has been formulated we have to look at the other sites competing for rankings on the search engines using these keywords. How many are there? How well are they optimized? Can our site realistically compete with these existing sites?

At the time of writing Google results show "about 1,310,000 for web designers thailand", and this site ranks at number two. In this case there is quite a lot of competiton, but once we looked at the sites we would be competing with we knew that we could beat most of them quite easily. Most web designers in Thailand (and elsewhere) have no real understanding of search engine optimization, so our task was not too difficult.

For your site this may not be the case. Some areas are very competive indeed!

Highly competitive keywords

The travel industry for example is one of the most competitive areas online, simply because there is huge money to be made and everyone is trying to get their slice of the pie.

To rank well for any travel related keywords takes a lot of work, and smaller businesses will need to choose a niche area in order to rank well on any search engine. To get a top ten position for "thailand hotels" would be almost impossible for a small company with limited resources because there are so many big sites competing for this keyword.

Finding your niche can give you a far greater chance of success

Focusing on a niche area is often the way smaller business will have the greatest success, but how do you find your particular niche? The first thing to do is to look closely at your business to see what sets it apart from your competitors.

If a travel company specialises in tours to certain areas that others don't, this would most likely be their niche. Or if they specialised in tours for older people or senior citizens for example, this would set them apart from most other businesses and we would aim our research at this target market.

Once we have this information all our efforts can then go into finding keywords that would deliver a very much more targeted audience to your site. This gives a smaller business a far greater chance of success than trying to compete head on with large established sites online.

Keyword and competitor analysis starts at 10,000 Thai Baht.

Contact us to find out more.

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