I gave a seminar tonight called SEO for Africa that looked at Picking The Right Keywords & 15 Simple Techniques You Can Use To Get On Page 1. It was a great event and we also raised some money for African entrepreneurs. I thought it would be valuable to the Young Entrepreneur community to share some of the insights that came from the event.
The first part dealt with finding the best keywords for your site.
Here is the foolproof way that anyone can find the best keywords to use:
1) Build a keyword list
Look at your website and come up with a variety of keywords that you think would be relevant. Try to get at least 8-10 important key words / key phrases on the list. Based on the Young Entrepreneur forums, a list of keywords for YE could be something like:
- Young entrepreneur
- Business startup ideas
- Business funding
- New small business idea
- Business flyer
- Become an entrepreneur
- Teen entrepreneurs
- Entrepreneur bio
- Make money today
2) Expand the list with Google
Google has created a keyword tool for its AdWords advertisers that website owners can also use for SEO purposes. Best of all it’s free! Just go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal, and enter in your keywords from step one. Also make sure that the Use synonyms button has been clicked. This will help give you more ideas.
3) Sort the list
The challenge in effective SEO is finding keywords that are popular enough that you can drive traffic but there isn’t much competition to rank for that keyword. You can be ranked number one for a particular keyword but if nobody is searching for it, who cares?
Fortunately Google tells you exactly which keywords are popular (average search volume) and which are the most competitive (advertiser competition). All you have to do is look for the keywords that have a decent average search volume and low advertiser competition. Google even gives you a huge list of ideas – all for free!
I put in the potential Young Entrepreneur keywords and found some interesting results! While some keywords will be very difficult to rank for, such as business funding, small business funding, become an entrepreneur, and business startup ideas, there are some serious opportunities to be made with other keywords. These promising ones include: business flyer template and entrepreneur bio. Both of these keywords have good search volume and very little competition.
If I were to run this search again with more keywords I could find additional ideas for keywords to optimize around.
4) Which is the most relevant for your business?
There are thousands upon thousands of opportunities to rank for keywords but which will drive the most quality traffic to your site? After you build your list of keywords that have traffic and little competition, analyze them carefully to see which ones will give you clients. Not all traffic is created equally after all.
In Young Entrepreneur’s case, would business flyer template or entrepreneur bio be more appropriate? Perhaps the answer is neither and the search can continue for new keywords.
You don’t need to stress out trying to guess the perfect keywords – simply use Google’s free tools to help create the combinations you are looking for.
Evan Carmichael
