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Target keywords or key phrases are the search expressions that you determine will be used most frequently by the customers you most want to attract to your website. By optimizing your content for these words or phrases, your goal is to improve your website’s ranking in your customers’ search results. Optify’s Keywords, Pages, and Lead Intelligence applications are designed to help you choose the most effective keywords, optimize your website pages for those keywords, and then track the effectiveness of your efforts in drawing the users you most want to attract.

The keyword refinement process

The process of choosing and implementing target keywords is cyclical, with the results feeding forward into new refinements, as in the diagram below:

Tips for choosing effective keywords

Choosing the most effective keywords to target your search engine optimization efforts is a crucial step in a successful website marketing strategy. Here are a few important tips to keep in mind:

• Target your Brand. The first place to start is to ensure that anyone searching on the name of your company or the name(s) of your products(s) can find your website easily in the search engines. In Optify, simply add your Company Name and Product Name(s) within the Keyword Suggestion tool.
•  Select other keywords that align with the business goals of your website.   
  • If your website is designed to attract customers to buy your product, you likely want to select keywords related to that product. For example, a Dallas firm that does temporary staffing for bookkeepers would want to target terms such as "contract bookkeeper" and "temporary bookkeeper". 
  • If the goal of your website is to establish yourself as a knowledgable resource in your field, you might select keywords that relate to your area of expertise. For example a realtor in Atlanta might target the term, "Atlanta kid-friendly neighborhoods".
  • The Optify Keyword Suggestion tool makes both of these types of keywords easy to discover. Simply enter related terms into the Keyword Suggestion tool and Optify will help you discover new keywords.
• Find keywords that are less competitive, but with meaningful volume. You'd be surprised at how many different ways people can say the same thing. Find iterations of your keyword terms that are less competitive in the search engines. The Dallas Accounting Staffing firm mentioned above may want to target terms like "certified bookkeeper". While the volume of searches on terms like this may be smaller, you stand a better chance at ranking high in the search engines. 
•  Target keywords that are more likely to deliver visitors that will convert to customers. "Dallas Bookkeeping" may have a higher volume of searches than "Dallas Bookkeeper", but the latter is likely to be more likely from someone that is looking to hire a bookkeeper. Some portion of people searching on "Dallas bookkeeping" might be looking for a school or local trade organization. 
• Target keywords for which you have or can develop unique content. One important strategy for getting traffic from a keyword is to have an article or other content on your website that contains several instances of that keyword. Optify makes it easy to find keywords related to the content that is already on your website using the Keyword Suggestion tool. Simply input your URL into the keyword suggestion tool and you'll get many related suggestions.
• Review actual keywords used to drive traffic After you have added the Optify tracking code to your website and you begin to develop a track records of your website traffic over time, you can use Optify's Lead Intelligence and Reporting applications to create a sophisticated picture of your keyword performance over time. Which keywords are being used by the visitors who actually convert? As part of the keyword refinement process outlined in the chart above, you should periodically review this data and refine your target keyword list so that you are targeting the keywords that have proven themselves to be most relevant to your business.

How the Optify Keywords application can help

The Optify Keywords application helps you find potential keywords and gives you important data on selected keyword relevance and ranking:. Specifically, it:

• Allows you to create a master list of all keywords, and then create smaller custom lists to focus your optimization efforts
• Shows you the performance of your keywords in selected search engines, and also lets you see the trend of your keywords over time
• Shows you your keyword performance in comparison with your competitors
• Lets you create Alerts to notify of changes to your keyword rankings
• Features a suggestion engine to quickly allow you to expand your list of target keywords

Keyword categories

• Brand – “Toyota”, “Prius”, “Bob Bridge Toyota”
• Competitor Brands -  “Honda”, “Ford”, “Insight”
• Generic or Head Terms – “Car”, “New Car”
• Mid Tail Terms – “Buy a New Prius”
• Long Tail – “2008 Blue Prius with Auto and Black Leather”
• Location – “Toyota Dealership Renton”
• Use Cases – “Great truck for skiing”
• Features – “hybrid cars”,  “heavy duty trucks”
• Benefits – “Great gas mileage”, “2 ton payload”, “4 wheel drive
• Modifiers -  “New”, “Used”, “Cheap”, “Free”, “Try”

Resources

• Getting started with SEO: Selecting keywords
• Webinar:  Optify Best Practices: Keyword Selection and Organization
• Create Lists to Organize Your Keywords