All you need to know about keyword relevancy to a website

If you think that you know how to choose what keyword phrases you should target on your website then this article it’s not for you. Here I’m trying to explain the process of creating a list of relevant keywords to target and what results you should expect from it. Identifying relevant keywords is a problem of knowing your business and your customers very well but it’s also a problem of experience, intuition, patience and a constant search for new words to target.

Understand what you have to offer

The entire process can start either before you have a website built or after. This has low importance. If you already have a website you will have to perform an SEO analysis in order to see the current state of your website in terms of SEO. In both cases you’ll first have to understand the business that will be presented in the pages of the website. Understanding as many things about the business as you can means that you will be able to later decide if a keyword is relevant or not to that business.

Keyword relevancy will be judge in shades of grey rather then black and white : by this I mean percentage. Identifying different aspects of the business will help you identify keyword phrases to target ( NOTE : when I talk about keywords I’m referring actually to keyword phrases. You’ll never target a single word. This is impractical ) and also you’ll be able to appreciate how much relevancy a certain keyword might have to your business.

Knowing the business starts with basics : location, clients (local, area, global), products and services (expensive, affordable, cheap, good quality, life saver and so on), words that describe the business (ex : professional, just what you need and so on). Making a list with all the things you learn will help a lot. Also try and underline the words you feel are key – words that are the essence. Around those words you’ll later build the keyword expressions you’ll target.

Think of how others would search on Google for your product

Place yourself on the other side of the barricade. Try to think as a customer would think. This is a very useful process as long as you know how to do it or what to look for. It’s mainly an expression : you will not be able to think like your customer because you are who you are and you have your own way to think. Not to mention that is your business and it’s hard to judge it as an outsider would do.

What you can do instead is to try and identify what problems or factors would make a person to go on Google and search for your products, services, business. Why a person would think that your product represents the solution to his problem. At this point you’ll have to start thinking about the essence : and that is What are the problems that might have as a solution your products or services. Identifying the problems will help you with two things :

1. you’ll know from where to start and look for keywords that have high relevancy to your business.

2. you’ll start the process of planning what content you should develop on your website or business blog : talk about the problem, offer a solution that is practical and affordable and you’ll get clients.

Ask yourself : “How relevant is this keyword for me ?”

At this point, after reading the headline for this section of the article you might ask yourself : why are we talking about establishing relevancy before actually identifying the keywords ? Because it’s a parallel process : identify relevancy of a keyword, do the math as I’ll explain in the next section and see if that keyword would worth the effort.

You have to believe me that each keyword deserves special attention : check for relevancy, check the traffic volume, check the traffic volume for different derived keywords, planning what articles could target that keyword. At the first impression might seem like few things to do : only 5 or 10. But when you’ll have a list of 100 keywords you’ll not want to do work that is not important and will only make you lose time and finally – money.

I’ll try and explain how to determine the relevancy by an example. Lets say your business is about offering professional websites for corporations. This basically means you are offering a web design service and that the service is not cheap. Big websites cost money.

Lets take some keywords and check the relevancy :

• “web design” : relevancy of maximum 5% – the reason : few corporations that want a website or some work on their existing websites search on Google for those keywords. Many of the searches of this keyword are related to other things.

• “cheap web design” or “free web deisgn : relevancy 0% – the reason : you are not offering a cheap service, not to mention free.

• “affordable web design” – relevancy depends but I would say maximum 30%

• “web design service” : relevancy 50% to 60% – the reason : from the total number of searches how many are corporations

• and the list could go on

Create a base of relevant keywords and do the math

Now you have a list of relevant keywords that you want to target. You arrived at the moment of truth. For each keyword you have it’s search volume and it’s relevancy. Multiply these numbers for each keyword (ex : you have a search volume of 1000 and relevancy of 20% then the result will be 20% of 1000 = 200 ) and after that add all the results. This is the gold number : the perfection. This number shows you the maximum traffic you could receive from organic searches that would matter to you.

I will not talk about the importance of this number here but just think of it. If that would be the maximum number of visitors(that matter to you) to your website and from those visitors 2% would buy then how would you rate your business ? Now think that you’ll not get that maximum number of visitors from organic searches. Lets say you’ll receive 10% of it. Now see if the 2% buyers would work for you. How about 1%.

You need to think of all this because sometimes a business should go online only to connect with other businesses because the products or services they are offering are not generating enough search volume. Think of that before to invest : how big is the online demand for this product or service ?

Finding relevant keywords should be continuous

Always search for relevant keywords for your business. Why ? Because you’ll always offer something new or a product changes or you want to test something. There are plenty reasons to keep on searching. This is the only way to target hundreds of keywords and get more traffic from organic searches.

Let me know what you think. Share your opinions or your questions. Comment bellow even if you disagree but make it civilized.