One of the first steps in optimizing your website and planning and effective SEO strategy is to conduct thorough keyword research. Many companies are beginning to understand how important and necessary a good strategy is, yet they have no clue how the process begins. The answer is keywords. A keyword or keyword phrase is what a user will enter into the search engine to find the products and services that they desire. Many companies only partially grasp the concept of keywords, and will say something like “I want to be the first site that comes up when you type in the word ‘real estate agency’.” What many companies don’t understand is that an SEO company performs extensive research on which keywords or keyword phrases will benefit your company the most.
While no SEO company should guarantee you the “first ranking” or “top spot” on the search engines as they do not work for or with the major search engines, they can get you to the number one position or very close to the top. Two important concepts when conducting keyword research are search volume and competition. Search volume is important to look at, since the greater the number of people searching for your chosen keyword means the more natural traffic your website will be acquiring. Competitiveness for that particular keyword, however, can make your SEO efforts much more demanding. Business often think that they should be optimized for their business name as opposed to a more general or frequently used keyword. Optimizing for “Example Business Name” will not have as much search volume as “Austin real estate” for example.
So how do you get started on optimizing your website? Your SEO company will begin first with keyword research, where they can determine not only how many local and global searches are conducted on a monthly basis for your potential keywords, but they can also estimate the difficulty of getting your website ranked.
Any good SEO company will be able to get you ranked over the course of time. While competitive keywords can take more time and effort to build your ranking, they are often the keywords that pay off more in the long-run, since the increased traffic will be going to your site versus your competitors. Keyword research is especially important if you have a smaller SEO budget, since you will have less room for error. A larger campaign can benefit from using multiple keywords, and will help expand their visibility.
Once your Austin SEO company has decided which keywords are ideal for your company, they will create an integrated campaign for onpage and offpage SEO that will primarily optimize your keywords while adding a mix of blogging, natural link building and social media management.
Matt Foster is the CEO of ArteWorks SEO, a full service Internet marketing firm, who has been active in the SEO industry since 1995. Mr. Foster can be found on Twitter @ArteWorks_SEO. ArteWorks SEO can be found at www.arteworks.biz.
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