Keyword Targetting

My understanding has always been to target a high volume, high competition keyword with your main URL and landing page and then to target low competition, long tail keywords with all of your supporting pages.

If you successfully rank for all of your long tail keywords, then you can start focusing on your high competition keyword being that you have established a solid SEO foundation.

Does this answer your question?

Hi Trevor,

I don't want to disillusion you but 50 searches per month unless your selling products over $2000 will hardly be worth the effort, or did you mean per day?

50 exact searches means theoretically 40-50% if you are #1 (so approx 22 people) and 5-10% of those might actually purchase the product from your site.

The WL industry is one of the largest industries with the highest competition and unless you're going to dedicate 90% of your time and invest money with direct or targeted traffic such as adwords, you might find youself facing a brick wall.

People who make money in this niche are either authorty copywriters such as Alexa Smith or people that do nothing other than paid traffic.

It's not so much finding top keywords with low competion(not in this niche), it's about holding the attention of the reader and turning them into buyers and that isn't learnt in a few weeks.

I could give you many tips to rank your site but whether that's enough?

just MHO

cheers
TW

50 searches a month is pretty low. You'll be looking at about 0.8 visits a day if you get to the top spot.

Try to have keywords relevant to your content. If the XXX product is a weight loss tablets for instance, then it is perfectly fine to promote it as your keywords.

Remember that you should optimise every page of your website for unique keywords. And don't exaggerate the number of keywords or phrases you use for each of the pages.

1 keyword per page, and combine where you can.

Make sure you're doing your competition analysis right though. It can make or break you. Optimizing for a keyword you can never rank for is a waste of time.

If you are going to build a site around multiple keywords, then you should try to get a generic domain, eg: weightlossresources.com

Then you can create separate pages for each keyword you want to target and use your homepage to either target a particularly good related keyword, or use it as a support for all the sub-pages.

Now, when you say all your keywords have low competition, how are you determining this? You would have to be extremely lucky to find any low competition keywords in WL that have decent number of searches.

"All of the keywords on my list have at least 50 exact searches per month", according to OP said, those keywords are really low competitive, so build a website targets all 100 keywords would be more profitable. Because exact searches around 50 is too low competitive.

Hi Trevor

UMS is correct here,

you can have 100,000,000 google entries for a keyword but if they're doing little to optimize or maintain their rankings (this is the strength), then it can be a walk in the park to top them.

I (as many people) use Market Samurai to find these values, there really isn't any need to scour thru the sites and check them inividually, basically MS gives you everything you need to know regarding the targeted keywords. Checking the competition directly can be helpful though, for getting ideas and new keywords, but I use a different tool for that...I'll try to find the link to it here in the forum.

I was participating in another thread for quite some time and people seemed to get confused as to how to justify a good keyword or seperate a buyers keyword from an info keyword.

It's quite easy really and I don't use all the shiny things that some people use to decipher the good or bad keywords...in MS I would check the "SEOV" value, the higher the value the, the higher the buyers keyword value and attempt to confine my keywords to under 300K competition, but even if the SEOV numbers are low it can still be a winner, that depends a lot on the trends. Keyword tools obviously only have restricted mathematical possibilities based on the provided information. We, on the other hand can attempt to predict the future trends based on many other factors.

SEOV is the expected value I could receive for that keyword if positioned at #1(based on past values).
I would then go to google insight and check the trends.
With a continuous downward trend you need to check the global keyword for similar products, because E.g. the "Samsung 3D LED TV" or the "Samsung 3D HYBRID TV" might be the new trend and this would basically save you a lot of wasted time writing content and trying to compete against the STRONG competition for an out-dated "Samsung 3D TV" (as keywords)

By checking google insights you will find the HOT products and you can confirm they're hot by simply entering into google (as in the above example) :

samsung 3D tv "magazine" "new" "2011"
or
samsung 3D tv "video" "new" "2011"

Just play around with different terms.

If the top magazine are writing about your choice of keywords, you can almost guarantee, (combined with the other methods) that you have a buyers keyword.

BUT now comes the crunch as UMS said...the strength of the competion:

There are many niches where the competition sleep but also those who NEVER sleep. This is one of the MAIN reasons for never reaching the top positions and it is so easily overlooked by newbies and intermidiates alike.

when using MS to measure the strength(within the SEO section), the colors associated to the provided values confuse many people and can easily be misinterpreted or overlooked. This very often leads to making the wrong decision.

Anyways... I set up a point system about 8 months ago.

when I initially wrote this in a different thread I had 4 sites up in this area of work, I now have 32 and 24 are #1 to #3 using excellent on-page SEO, simple social bookmarking and B2B using RSS. The sites that are under #3 are simply too new and 2 of them I neglected for other reasons. This is how I use (or interpret) the strength of the competition with Market Samurai:

I have attatched an image for better understanding.

I assign/replace in the SEO competition section:
RED "Y" with 3 points
Orange "Y" with 2 points
and completely ignore the GREEN "Y".

I then add up the points from left to right - from "BLP to HEAD" inclusive and then take the totals of those:

totals up to 100 are "easy " keywords
totals between 100 and 120 are "good" keywords
totals between 120 and 140 are "doable" keywords

anything over 140 points "forget it" keywords

Don't forget...this is about getting to #1 on the search engines, NOT just page 1

The First image totals 129 points "doable" keywords(difficult competition)



the second image totals 100 points "GOOD" keywords(Relatively EASY competition)




This way you have measurable value to find their strength and calculate your possibilities/time and money necessary to reach #1.


thought it "might" be an interesting share

cheers
TW