What's your process for determining which keywords to use in an SEO campaign? Obviously there are some keywords that are simply too competitive to tackle. I've used the google keyword tool a little to try and help determine which keywords are achievable, but the tiny little green bar under "competition" just doesn't seem accurate. Most of you will probably say that anything is achievable with the right amount of money behind it. While this may be true in some cases, most of us don't have client's willing to spend infinite amounts of money on SEO. Essentially, if I pick the wrong keywords I could end up doing a lot of work for nothing. So my question is, how do you determine which keywords for your campaign are actually achievable?
I use google keyword tool to do some research to find the most appropriate keyword to rank for and then I use this to find the competitions on the Google search result hope this help you. allintitle:"your keyword" it give you the clear amount of competition for that keyword.
i think the green bar is about company bidding that keyword for PPC and not about organic competition
That's not the way Check by checking on google Search the Keyphrase see how many results they have Search intitle:keyphrase see how many results they have Regards
I do determine achievable keywords by doing a simple Google search, then on the top 3 competitors I would run a "backlinkchecker" to see what PR and how many backlinks they got. If I belive I can beat them I usually go for it.
If you have a newer site then you will most likely want to target longer tail keywords vs shorter tail and more competitive ones. So for example if your site is about 'ford mustang' cars then you will most likely not be able to rank for that term, so you will want to try and target a longer tail phrase which has less competition and you will have a better chance of ranking for such as '1968 Ford Mustang Restoration' or something like that (I have not looked at how competitive these key phrases are, so both of them may end up being competitive in this example. You should use a keyword search tool like Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, Google Adwords Keyword Tool, etc. to get an idea of how many times a particular key phrase is searched). The great thing about the '1968 Ford Mustang Restoration' key phrase is that you still are targeting the 'Ford Mustang' key phrase because it is contained within your phrase, but you are also targeting '1968 Ford Mustang Restoration', '1968 Ford Mustang' and 'Ford Mustang Restoration'.
It's more advisable to use the keyword search tool, so you'll be able to monitor the competition, as well as the global and local searches. Select the top 3 or 5 keywords and focus your marketing efforts on them.
The Wordtracker keyword tool has an exact figure of competition for a keyword. The competition takes into account any site which has the keyword in the title tag, and the anchor text of an inbound link.