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
-
Using Adwords to determine effective SEO keywords
Hello, My name is Mitchell and I'm new to the MOZ community and to the SEO field. I just recently launched an e-commerce website that sells refurbished laptops and computers and I have been researching ways to bring traffic and sales to our website. I understand that the first step to building an effective SEO campaign is to determine effective keywords to build from: targeted traffic + good volume.I've used several online tools to find relevant keywords and it appears that most of the relevant keywords are already Highly competitive and the first 2 Google pages are usually taken over by big name brands.I understand that I need to find low competition long tail keywords and start my way up from there.Assuming that I find 5-10 long tail keywords with low competition and decent search volume, here are my questions:- Should I test these long tail keywords with Google Adwords to find out if they convert well BEFORE I optimize my website for them?- Since I will be having several different long tail keywords, do I need to have a separate webpage on my site for each? (I believe that it's suggested to have one page per keyword, maximum 2)- If yes, does that mean that each long tail keyword needs to have it's own back links to bring in traffic?- Should I optimize my homepage for a long tail keyword as well? or should I optimize it for the more broader keywords and create sub-pages for the long tail keywords?- One of my site's main products is a very popular item and has high competition and search volume. Would it make sense to purchase a domain name that spells out the item (ej. HP-Pavillion-DV6.com) and publish reviews, specs and information about the item there (using a blogging service like Tumbler or Wordpress)? Or redirect the domain name to a page on my site with that information? Or just create a page on my site with that information and create back-links to it? Thanks in advance for your taking the time to respond and for your invaluable feedback. Respectfully, Mitchell.
Keyword Research | | Wasabii0 -
Keyword Research Help
Hi all, My website is www.bruadair.com which is a luxury 7 bedroom villa in Barbados primary suited for large groups and weddings , using googles adword keyword tool i have been trying to establish some long tail keywords that i could include in my website. However i am finding it extremely difficult to find any long tail keywords (such as: Luxury 7 bedroom Villa Barbados ) that are receiving any local or global searches, it seems that there are only extremely competitive keywords receiving traffic. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how i can find effective keywords? With this type of website is it really as likely to be able to rank high due to the pure amount of keyword competition? I would really appreciate any help given as i am really struggling with my keyword research 😞 Thank you very much!!
Keyword Research | | Tmgale0 -
Title keyword and synonyms in content ?
what is the % relation in between a keyword in title and that given keyword's synonyms in a content of that page? if i use the keyword "apple pie" on a page title once, what should be % of reappearance of this keyword in the content ? and its synonyms in relation to the entire content on that page. thank you
Keyword Research | | orion680 -
Advice - Keywords, good semantic practice...
Hi everyone, I'm still new to SEO so bear with me. I'm fairly ok with what determines good 'On page optimization' grading. Have a few good results but mostly for my ecommerce website. Now I'm building up blog content I'm often puzzled how SEO experts balance good editorial web page titles with how people actually search. An example: Buy Biggie Smalls Versace Sunglasses I have created the page title 'Buy Biggie Smalls Versace Sunglasses - Company' Created a and tag with the same keywords... drop the term a few times on the page, add to a few alt tags, add the term to the url.... but this looks contrived & isn't exactly an exciting web page title which would entice people to click through. Or is it? A more interesting web page title might be something like 'Versace & Biggie Smalls - his influence on a new generation of Hip Hop culture'. Ok this is a completely different long-tail keyword phrase. But do I need to do both? How would a seasoned SEO expert blend the dull search term into some interesting page title and hence all other on page optimization aspects. Hope you get what I'm trying to explain. Thanks for looking... Kevin
Keyword Research | | well-its-1-louder0 -
Acne related keywords in Google.fr
Hello everyone, I am setting up a website with domainname.fr to rank in google.fr with Acne related keywords. Can anyone give me Competitive keywords which can bring more than 10K visitors per month?? Help will be very much appreciated. P.S: Actually, my uncle is having an offline acne product shop in France. He asked me to setup a website in Google.fr so that he can make some money.
Keyword Research | | artemmin0 -
Spammy Industry Keyword Research
Hi everyone, First question posted on here. I have spent a lot time this week going through videos and discussions since I signed up here earlier this week. We're just starting in a particular niche that is powerful (home-based businesses), but EXTREMELY spammy with all the at-home opportunities from stuffing envelopes, to MLM, etc. Then there's the other side which is not as spammy, but just not an overall good business model with the in-home Tupperware, candle, and makeup party sales companies. The people that we help and serve are just people who want to start up a part-time or full-time home-based business doing what they love. Maybe it's a dad who loves golf and would like to start a golf store on Ebay or a lady who is great at making stuff and wants to open an Etsy shop or start selling her goods at craft fairs. Our program is more about teaching them how to start a real home-based business that can either earn them a profit either part-time or fulltime while also doing what they love and spending time with their family. My biggest question right now as we begin the Keyword Research and SEO process part of this, is how do we go about doing the keyword research for this while also dealing with a spammy niche? All the research I've been doing for home-based businesses comes back to all the ugly examples I gave above and that isn't the type of people that we're a good fit for. I appreciate all your help and guidance in advance. Been doing web development for 10+ years but finally taking the tiger by the throat and actually learning the SEO/SEM piece myself.
Keyword Research | | buzzmediallc0 -
Newbie question about keyword difficulty tool
Hi guys, It's my first day here ate seomoz and I got intrigued about the results from the keyword difficulty tool. Even though I do understand the results, I noticed the ranking analysis table has some highlighted cells and some of them have a dark checkmark sign inside. What exactly do they mean? I couldn't find it anywhere. Cheers from Brazil. i0tzl.png
Keyword Research | | lenineto0 -
Please help with SEO keyword research
Hi Moz community, I would like to request your collective wisdom. I'm new to SEO and putting together an SEO research and strategy document for the employment service I work for. Have solid skills in Google Adwords and have ran a campaign over the last two years with excellent results. But this SEO thing is a whole new world! That's why who better to turn to than the leading community for SEO professionals? 🙂 Any support, advice, tips would be most welcomed appreciated. It's an employment service and I've got a list of keywords. For example, here are some of the action words I thought could be useful: <colgroup><col width="215"> <col width="91"> <col width="65"></colgroup> [find staff] 0.79 73 [find employees] 0.97 73 [looking for staff] 0.94 58 [looking for staff] 0.94 58 [staff wanted] 0.62 58 [looking for employees] 0.94 46 [look for work] 0.77 36 [looking for workers] 0.93 36 [find workers] 0.91 36 [employee search] 0.72 28 [staff search] 0.37 28 [find an employee] 0.79 22 [search for employees] 0.71 12 [find a worker] 0.66 12 [how to find employees] 0.71 12 My questions: Where to from here? If this was a Google Adwords campaign I would place the words in, create ad copy and test response. But with SEO, are these words useful? Can you target all of these words with SEO - or am I better finding words with higher volume? How many words should I be looking to target? For example, am I only trying to find the 5 or 10 highest volume words, or is it important to target lots of words with SEO? Is it just one set of keywords per page, or can I target all the above keywords on one page? I'm a bit lost. Thanks in advance for your consideration.
Keyword Research | | jasonlewisdiiigy0