SEO Tip #4, Pick your Keywords wisely

SEO Tip #4: Business vs Marketing choose wisely

A fews weeks ago, I wrote a blog about why I don’t know as much about SEO, as I thought I did. This was just after I learned about the Matt Cutts video about White Hat SEO tips. At that point, I did this in a tounge and cheek sort of a way, as that day I thought about writing an occasional SEO tip blog and making that a regular column of this site. I have been humbled once again, and this time by my friend Mark, who is a SEM guru, and knows a ton about about Internet Marketing, Marketing and sales. Thank god he does not know about SEO as much as I do, but no matter how much you know, you can always learn more. This is what he helped me learn yesterday, yes on a Sunday, we met tod discuss why it is so difficult to measure the return on investment for SEO, especially when SEM or Pay per click ads work so well so quickly. No matter what you do, you have to SEO for the proper keywords with high enough traffic, otherwise you are just wasting your time. This leads us to our SEO tip #4, which is to use the Google Adwords Tool, keyword Estimator to see the size of the traffic. I have used this tool before yesterday for our SEM campaigns, but not as our SEO Keyword Tool, and I think everyone should use it to figure out the right keywords to SEO for.

So what exactly is the difference? We all know that we need to SEO our websites or blogs for the best and highest traffic keywords that target our customers. In the past to get accurate keyword numbers on a monthly basis, we use to recommend Overture/Yahoo’s Search Marketing tool. We stopped recommending it last year, as it was inaccurate and did not seem to provide consistent data. Most Keyword Search tools are still using it and are therefore inaccurate. So SEO Tips #4 is that you need to use the Google Adwords account, and go to the Tools section, and use the Keyword Estimator to see how many clicks you will get for your keywords. For our purposes of building the business social networking site for b2b lead generation for ITEX, we are contemplating targeting the keywords business versus marketing. We just saw some major differences in traffic, as the keyword Business could get a whopping 30,000 clicks in a day, while marketing can get about 6,000. These are still huge numbers compared to even keywords such as SEO and blogging, which we focus on quite a bit. Which get about 100 to 500 clicks a day, so which one’s should we target? Go ahead and comment let us know, I will tell you out bias, at the bottom of the post.

Not that I want to beat this keyword thing to death, it is important to discuss the far reaching effects of this SEO tip of targeting high traffic keywords. Folks you have to drive enough traffic for your business, that is the bottom line, and we all have to focus on driving sales for our companies. And, that usually means our SEO efforts have to lead to higher targeted traffic leads. This world of lead generation and business marketing usually has to do with b2b and b2c companies. We as SEO experts are dealing with the ultimate goal of any website, to get any many leads as possible for the business. Which ultimately leads to more sales. Some times and often sales are conducted on the website without having to lead to leads, sales are the ultimate goal, leads don’t matter as much, and that is usually the case with b2c sites. So other than the world of b2b business products for businesses buying and selling things to each other, things usually fall in to b2c, which deals with business to consumers, rather than b2b which is business to business. You have undoubtedly seen that SEO is discussed in many SEO blogs for both segments and makes a difference for both types of websites.

For our personal Internet Marketing business, we are trying to decide which keyword to target, both marketing and business related keywords are being discussed internally. As they are probably the top 5 most related keywords to grab business related traffic. So who is searching for this kind of traffic and why should we care? First of all, SEO which stands for Search Engine Optimization is part of SEM, which stands for Search Engine Marketing, which is part of Internet Marketing, which is part of Marketing, which is one of the biggest components of Business. All of this makes sense if you are an SEO company which we are, so we belong in the world of business, but isn’t it important that we target the world of marketing first? Yes, it seems like I am thinking out loud, isn’t that the purpose of blogs, to make our journaling part of the interactive conversation with our self and our readers:-)?

So for marketing to be effective, it has to promote the business to sell products and services. And, for SEO to be effective it has to look at keywords from Google Adwords Traffic Estimator tool, and the bigger the targeted traffic the bigger your sales. I did need to confirm this SEO Tip and hammer it home, you need to target high enough traffic keywords.

So don’t get ranked high for the wrong keywords, as you won’t get the traffic, the leads or the sales. This is what will happen to you even if you did a great job as an SEO. I hope all of this makes sense, this is what I was trying to do to provide a wholistic view of SEO in the grand scheme of business and marketing. If you found this topic boring or too confusing drop me a line, I will go back and read and edit this article again, it was difficult for me to write.