Choosing the right keywords to use in your SEO strategy can be daunting. You want to make sure you choose the right keywords to attract the right people to your products and services. The goal is to have your keywords have a high search volume and relevance with low difficulty or competition.

Search Volume

Search Volume is basically the size of the market (the amount of people searching for that specific term) and relevance is the chance that someone would click on the term to purchase your products and services. You need to know how many people search each month for your keywords. Google provides a free tool that estimates search queries for your keywords and will also provide other popular search terms.

Relevance

You will want to know how many people who search a keyword will purchase from you. The more relevant the better chance that person will purchase your product. Estimate for yourself how relevant your search terms are to your products and/or services. The best ways to do this is to analysis and track your results. Look at people coming to your website through those terms and ask yourself, are they becoming customers? If not, then there could either be something wrong with your website or it might not be the best term. You will want to re-visit your website and search terms.

Difficulty (Competition)

Difficulty and competition is basically the chance that you are going to rank on the first page of the search engine for specific search results. In order to rank higher in the search engines, you will need to jump ahead on the page. The way to do that is to have a more powerful website than the other competitors on that page. You will want to know your probability of getting on the first page of Google. Look at the existing websites that come up first for your keywords and analysis their SEO strength through various techniques. Another way to gauge competition is to look at Google AdWords. Find out what the cost for the different search terms are and that will give you an idea of what terms are more competitive.

Start small with less difficult terms and work your way up to more competitive keywords. Make sure to track your changes so you find out what works. Once you have your keywords selected you can implement on-page SEO and off-page SEO