by Dr. William Sen | Founder of blue media

Choosing the Right SEO Keywords

Make Sure Your Keywords Are "Competitive"

If your page says “Welcome” or anything similar as a heading then you must know: Google will think that your website is about “Welcoming people”— which will work if your website is about hospitality or acceptance.

Other than that, “Welcome” and many other high generic keywords are a very bad choice from an SEO standpoint. Why is that?

You always want to make sure you use keywords that match your topic. Google and other search engines use automatic topic detection methods to determine what your page is about. Since the headline of your website is one of the most important elements on your page, you want to use it in the most efficient way.

What Is A Competitive Keyword?

A competitive keyword is a word or phrase that has search volume, i. e. search queries people use.

For instance, if your page is about “appointment scheduling software solutions“, you should use “time scheduling software” as a keyword and not “appointment scheduling software“.

This is because 1,600 people search for “appointment scheduling software” on Google every month, while almost no one types “time scheduling software”. This is how it looks on Google Keyword Tool when you conduct a research for these two keywords:

• appointment scheduling software: 1,600 searches/mo
• time scheduling software: 20 searches/mo

This is why search volume has to be considered when creating headlines. If a keyword you use has low or no search volume, then it’s considered a non-competitive keyword. Therefore, not including a competitive keyword causes you to not capitalize on the opportunity to drive traffic to your page. Would you rather capture 20 people per month or 1,600 people? 

But this is just one side of the story. A keyword that has an enormous amount of search volume is also a highly competitive keyword. For example, if you use keywords such as “management“, “money” or “awesome“, you are going after keywords you can’t compete with—unless you’re as big as Forbes or Times Magazine. It’s extremely unlikely that you will be seen on top of Google using such high-competitive keywords. In Information Sciences these kind of keywords or tags are also called “Power Tags”.

This is the kind of results you should expect from SEO agencies when they provide an audit:

• Generic and high competitive keywords
  If your blog category is called, “Management,” then an audit should reveal that you’re using a highly competitive keyword and therefore your blog category won’t be seen due to high competition. You wouldn’t be able to compete in the market using such generic keywords.
• Non-Descriptive Keywords
  If you’re using titles such as “awesome”, you are not really describing the topic. An SEO would tell you to change your title.
• Keywords with low search volume
  As described above, if you’re using appointment scheduling software instead of time scheduling software, the SEO agency should let you know which is the better choice.

Either you use keywords that nobody types, or you use keywords that are extremely generic, an SEO audit usually has a section for “Keyword Research”. Keyword research never ends with one audit. It’s always a never-ending process in SEO. If you have many articles, it will take some time for the SEO agency to provide keyword research for each article. Besides, you also want to consider creating new content with new efficient keywords.