By Eric, JBA director of SEO/SEM
How do long-tail keywords work?
– They provide traffic at low volume but are less competitive
– Easier to optimize in the Search Engines
– Lower cost per click in SEM
How should companies identify the best keywords to target to drive business?
This is a bit more difficult to answer in bullets. Many factors come into play that will vary depending on the business. “Small business”. Are we talking products or services? Local, national, or worldwide? Budget?
Local business
Analyze top competitors and aggregate the keywords they are showing ads for. This indicates profitability depending on the consistency of the ads. We have an aggregator that pulls this data for us.
Check Google maps and determine the competitiveness of keywords individually. This is as simple as sending a query with “near me” included in the search. From that, we can look at the yellow stars which represent client reviews and then pull their citations with White Spark or Bright Local to see how many citations/directory submissions and if it’s worth it or not. Choosing less competitive keywords or lower hanging fruit, is beneficial to clients with smaller budgets.
Of course a little keyword research with the Keyword Planner tool provided by Google in combination with an SEO tool will show all potential keywords. Then it’s a manual process of “Googling” each keyword and manually checking the competition. Running the competition through an aggregator like Ahrefs will speed the process of analysis.
National or Worldwide Business
Same process as local, excluding the local citations/directory submissions. For SEM it’s a matter of determining keywords with a higher probability of profit and ROI. For SEO its more the competition of Organic search results and what the competitors link profiles look like. For instance if your competitor has tons of links from authority websites like CNN, Huffpost, Forbes, etc. and your budget is $2k a month, we would not consider the keyword and look for long tail keywords that show results in Google that have links from less authoritative sites that are easier to obtain.
Clothing (just used as an example)
Keywords are irrelevant and are highly competitive, being that larger brands have pretty much taken over the search engines at this point.
Conclusion
There’s a bit of intuition, knowledge of the market, and analysis involved when deciding the keywords. You don’t really know until you begin analyzing data from the aggregators. Data like links, authority, moz rank, majestic flow, CPC, consistency of competitors running ads, traffic volume. Then budget will determine feasibility of rank or competing with other companies.