What Search Volume Should My Keywords Have?
When you are deciding on keywords to target with your website, the search volume is going to be one of the biggest factors you pay attention to. You want a keyword that gets many searches a day, but hopefully isn’t so competitive that you’ll have to fight tooth and nail for every one of them. There are a few ways of handling this problem, so let’s look at the more common internet marketing solutions.
Look For Direct Competition
If you search for your keyword inside quotation marks, Google will return the exact number of pages that have that term on it. If there is a small number of sites, then you can rank with relatively little work. It’s not hard to find some long tail terms in the Google Adwords Tool that will rank in the top 100 immediately after publishing, although it’s hard to say how much backlinking it will take to move them up to the top 10. If the top pages are powerful, you may end up getting stick too low down to take advantage of the ranking.
Target a Large Number of Keywords
Another way of handling this problem is to target tons of keywords by writing dozens or even hundreds of posts. As you build up articles on your site and interlink all of them, the link juice will flow freely and the site itself will become easier to rank as time goes on. You still need external links coming in, but a larger site will tend to float to the top a little faster, especially if it has quality content.
Target the Long Tail
A final way is a bit of a mix of these two tactics. Target a keyword that has a number of long tail terms. You can determine this by looking into your keyword search statistics if you already have pages online, or by looking in the Adwords Tool if you don’t. Any keyword that is already bringing you long tail traffic, or a keyword with lots of long tails listed underneath it in the Tool, probably has a lot of related traffic that isn’t exactly the keyword. You may not be able to rank for that one word, but odds are you can catch some of those long tail terms, and eventually rank for the main keyword too.
These are just a few basic ideas on how to rank your site better. For more advice on how to prove to Google you deserve those #1 rankings, check out this website, Website Obsession. This site hosts dozens of tutorials on all aspects of SEO and content writing, enough to give you a clear path to success.
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