posted in search engine optimization on 2 January 2012
by Andrew Lang
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New Keyword Research Service from Puresilva

Despite all the hype about Facebook and Twitter as platforms to promote a business, ~~the search engines~~ Google still provides the most targeted, intent-driven traffic to websites. The difference between someone clicking on a link in Facebook or Twitter, to someone actually typing something in a search engine, and THEN clicking on a link is enormous. Google requires the searcher to reveal their intentions prior to clicking, making the ad space and top 5 rankings for any given search results page in Google the most sought-after piece of real estate on the entire web.

When people think of ~~search engines~~ Google as a means to get them traffic, you often hear "can you get me top 10 in Google?". The typical response from an SEO company is "yes, sure". An inappropriate answer to an inappropriate question. The appropriate question should be "what keywords should I be ranking top 5 for?". It's all about keywords. Researching the RIGHT keywords for your website is the most important aspect of your SEO plans. You could be wasting so much time and effort on the wrong keywords that are:-

too competitive (require months of effort, thousands of pounds) if your budget and patience doesn't allow
too generic (e.g. "clothing", "cars")
irrelevant
have low volume search (not many people using these keywords)

For the best keywords, you need to find ones that have that magic combination of having fairly low competition while having a fairly high search volume. And of course, are relevant to the content of your site - so that you receive targeted, relevant visitors.

A big problem today is that so-called SEO firms simply cannot be relied upon to do proper keyword research. They may deliberately target very weak keywords that are easy to rank for, and lo-and-behold, give their client some reports of how they've achieved top 10 rankings for a whole range of keywords, while not gaining any new traffic for their client, since nobody is actually USING those keywords to find things in Google. Whenever you hear an SEO company say "we can get you top 10 in Google", just realise that is a meaningless statement. It's all about keywords.

And so puresilva are offering a new keyword research service that will work transparently as we will state WHY these keywords are relevant. For each keyword we recommend, we will show:-

Overall score - based on ease of ranking combined with number of people searching for this keyword
monthly searches (explicitly showing you search volume)
cost per click if you were to use Google Adwords
ACTUAL predicted number of visitors if you rank 1 to 3, 4 to 7, and 8 to 10 in Google for this keyword

The cost will be just £1 per keyword, and a company could take that list of data (e.g. 25 keywords) to any SEO firm knowing they have the best keywords based on data available (service will go live on 3rd Jan 2012, and will be linked to via this blog entry as well as via "Tools" section of puresilva).

But can you trust the keyword list we give you? We get our data from a tool we use that costs us over $200 per month - this tool uses a cloud of servers to quickly extrapolate data from a single keyword and many related keywords (up to 1000) in just minutes. If we were to give you a list of 25 keywords, that might involve us sifting through dozens of keyword searches in this tool to identify those rare keywords that have the unique combination of relatively low competition with high search volume. But we would not only do that - we would produce two lists for you - one list showing those rare keywords that are relatively easier to rank for that get you decent traffic, and ANOTHER list showing the most targeted high volume keywords for your site, regardless of competition - these words are tougher to rank for, but they should be on your SEO radar for the long-term. So you get two lists of keywords:-

a shorter-term list for easier to rank keywords that get you decent traffic
the longer-term list of the BEST keywords that give you the MOST traffic regardless of how tough they are to rank for - keywords that you cannot ignore and will want to dominate for the longer-term

Knowing the best keywords isn't just something to learn for the sake of it - the whole point of having this list is so you can take concrete action IMMEDIATELY when this list is in your hand - knowing the best keywords to rank for helps you:-

hone your website's content - you can tweak your content to make it more on-page SEO friendly to the list of keywords
with your Adwords campaigns, knowing the best keywords at cost-effective CPC prices
if you are link building yourself, you can use these keywords in your anchor texts
if you are hiring an SEO company, you can present them these lists and ask them to build a link building campaign around them
identify your competition. Searching in Google with these keywords shows you the best of your competition and you can check out their sites to see why they are ranking so high
identify the most searched for products in your range of products. For example, if you sell pashminas, and most people are searching in Google for silver, cream and white pashminas, you can stock up on those on your site and do SEO campaigns for the pages on your site that sell silver, cream and white pashminas - this is exactly what I do with my own site, lovepashminas.com

You can sign up to our new keyword research service here

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