[A common Q] What keywords do you rank for...?

Reading many of the threads here on this forum Im seeing the same question pop up over and over again.

What keywords should I choose or what keywords are good to rank for?

Im also seeing a lot of conflicting and partial answers to these questions.

Before you even think about building a site you NEED to remember that your building a business and ALL businesses start with a plan. To answer the "what keyword" question you need to address several things before this stage.

What's your business/site going to be about? - This is your top level niche or topic that your website will be about. While its not necessary to have a keyword in your domain it does give you a little kudos towards ranking. Depending on what you want to achieve from your site will determine what you choose. Smaller sites with a few pages would be worth developing with a keyword in domain while larger sites with the intention of multiple pages (ie up towards the 100+ level) it might be worth thinking about a branding name for your business.

Now you have your niche you can start to think about some of the content for your site and as a result the keywords you may want to consider.

What are you going to talk about / promote? - What style of site are you going to develop? Will it be a product review site, an information site a bit of both, a magazine/lifestyle site or one of many other different concepts.

At this point you will want to collect and research all the possible keywords related to your site niche and concept and start to evaluate them. See what your competitors are doing to help with ideas, can you do something similar and better?

Once you have your keyword list if its a larger list you might want to group them together into more closely related terms / sub niches which could then be used for a category base for your site. By organising your keywords in this way you can then start to think about the structure of your site and how it will be laid out.

You will also want to assess the traffic and competition for each of your keywords so you have an idea of the sort of traffic you might expect from search results as well as the difficulty and time involved in ranking a site for your chosen keywords.

This is going to really help with your site rankings from your onsite factors as your planning your site logically and structuring it in a way that the search engines love... dont believe me, take a look at any site that ranks well and take a look at how their content is laid out.

eg. if your site is about dogs a possible site structure and categorisation might look like this...

dog.com - site
category

dog toys - keyword​

dog toy article/product 1 - keyword
dog toy article/product 2 - keyword
dog toy article/product 3 - keyword​

dog training - keyword​

dog training article/product 1 - keyword
dog training article/product 2 - keyword
dog training article/product 3 - keyword​

dog breeds - keyword​

dog breeds article/product 1 - keyword
dog breeds article/product 2 - keyword
dog breeds article/product 3 - keyword​

At this point you should understand that I have not registered a domain or written any content for the site. Its all in the planning. I should know by this point my niche, keywords, site structure and several ideas for content and ways to monetise that traffic.

IF and only if after doing this research can you decide if the site concept that you have is going to be worth your time and efforts to get positioned in the search engines.

I see so many comments about I have this site name what should I do with it or what is the best keyword for a site. The absolute honest answer is that it doesn't really matter what your site is called and there is no absolute way to determine a "best keyword" without knowing more information about your chosen niche.

If you haven't researched your niche before you register a domain and slap an article on it then your business is doomed to fail before you even get started. A good point to remember is the 5 P's Prior Planning prevents poor performance and I challenge you to find one successful business that does not have a business plan in place.

Before you build your next site and wonder why your not doing well with it think long and hard about what your doing and what you expect from your project. This really just touches the tip of the iceberg but should serve to give you a good idea of what you need to do BEFORE you ask "what's the best keyword for..."