What makes a keyword good?
-
Having taken a day-long course not long ago, I'm new to SEO and I'm struggling to decide which keywords to target. I work in a really niche area: we make booking engines that allow travel agencies to sell flights, hotels, cars and other travel services online.
I know there are various tools on the web (and on Moz) which give you the average monthly searches and competition for each term but I still don't understand how to decide which ones to target.
For example, the term 'travel systems' gets a high amount of search and the competition for it is high. However, Google brings back results about prams and buggies so I think I should avoid this one.
Another is 'travel solutions' which gets a high amount of search and is low on competition. Google brings back results about travel agencies. This is more our area but our target audience is travel agencies so I'm not really sure I'd be attracting the right traffic?
I'd be really grateful for any advice that you can give me.
-
Hi There,
It's great that you're niche. This means that you don' really need to worry much about difficulty. I get frustrated with people talking all the time about 'difficulty'. It's self-defeating. You should go out there and write content that's so good it beats all the competition no matter how 'competitive' or 'difficult' the keyword. If anyone in my team said they were going to be dissuaded from doing something because it was 'too difficult' I'd send them to another team
So look at your competitors but don't blindly follow them. Speak to your customers, stakeholders and suppliers to discover the words they use. Are there phones that you can listen in to at your business? I listen to call recordings to get a feel for what language patients are using.
And at the end of the day don't worry too much about semantics. Google is very good now at figuring out what you are talking about so I would be tempted to just do some free thinking and try to write the most comprehensively, the most brilliantly and with the most detail about these products and your customers will find you.
If they are technical customer, write technically. Don't 'dumb it down'. Use the big complex words and include an FAQ section to pick up questions and long tail keywords (but beware of keyword stuffing)
Once you have written some content then you'll be able to optimise and analyse and test and get a feel for what is right and what people are searching for and reading about. The competitor research is just the start and in a really niche place you often just need to get things down and out there in the world and see how they perform.
Once you get cracking you'll soon become an absolute specialist and if you keep your eyes on the data you should be able to dominate your niche. Tight niches are great. You're lucky because broad or very high volume keywords can have problems all of their own.
-
Hello,
Obviously you're looking for a combination of volume, relevance and difficulty. Low volume keywords which are difficult to rank for are less attractive than high volume keywords which have a low difficulty.
That said, those high volume keywords need to be as relevant as possible. I would always suggest that your content and SEO focus should be around user intent rather than specific words.
If you start with a list of what your customer's user intent is, then add in what problems your product solves, you will very quickly have written your keyword list - some of those keywords may be long tail but I don't think it matters all that much.
Example:
"software for travel agencies"
"programs that allow travel agencies to sell bookings online"
"Best travel agency software"
"travel agency online booking software"
"software for online tour operators"etc
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How do I do keyword research when search volume is unknown
Hi Mozzers! I do a lot of work in niche areas, and one issue I often confront in keyword research is unknown search volume. That is, I'll be doing keyword research in Keyword Explorer or Gooogle Search Console, and for the most relevant keywords, I find either very low search volumes, null search volumes, or "Data not available." How do I make good keyword planning decisions when I can't find good data for search volume? Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Andy
Keyword Research | | AndyKubrin0 -
Focus Keyword
Hi everyone! I am pretty new to SEO so all the help would be great. Does every webpage on our website need a focus keyword for example like the about us page. We have webpages for every location in the UK - Would it be helpful if the location webpages had a focus keyword also? Just to note that I am using Yoast on Wordpress. Many thanks,
Keyword Research | | SMCCoachHire
Aqib0 -
Coworker and I see totally different keyword volumes on same paid keyword planner account
My coworker and I are both connected to the same company's paid keyword planner account but are using our own individual google accounts to log in. When I look up the keyword "joint bank account" I get a search volume of 9,900, while she gets a search volume of 2,900. Does anyone know why this might be? Do we know which might be more accurate? This doesn't seem to be connected to Google lumping semantic variations together. I've seen it happen way before that update. It's hindering our headline pitching since the volume she sees does not meet our minimum search threshold. Any insight would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, Laira
Keyword Research | | CTI1 -
Multiple keywords one page.
I want to focus on these 4 keywords. E-waste management
Keyword Research | | themesh
E-waste recycling
E-waste solutions
Brand name Do I need to create a separate page for each or can focus them from home page itself, With title tag like this E-waste Management and recycling company in _Cityname _| Brandname:0 -
Image alt attribute - keyword stuffing?
If on the page (blog post) there is a lot of images and they all have the same alt attribute - is it keyword stuffing?
Keyword Research | | templatemonster0 -
How to Document Keyword Research?
How do you guys document keyword research? My best idea for this is an excel document that is separated into different areas for the topics of the website. Does anyone have any examples of documenting keyword research?
Keyword Research | | qlkasdjfw0 -
What do broad match keywords represent?
Exact match is perfectly easy for me to get my head around - broad match, not so much! Take the phrase, "removing blueberry stains." Is the broad match data for this that I'm seeing in the Google keyword tool for searches that involve any of these particular words, in any phrase, in any order - just so long as they're all there? Any help with this concept would be much appreciated.
Keyword Research | | ZakGottlieb710 -
Keyword question
In my keywords should they include the city name or not? Example..... plastic surgery or plastic surgery Orlando I know the search engine knows what city i am in, if i search for plastic surgery and i live in Orlando, does it pull up world wide plastic surgery links first or local plastic surgery clinics? Thanks in advance. Daniel
Keyword Research | | dools0