Step 1: Brainstorm and Select Keywords

 

If you decide to do SEO on your own rather than bring on a small-business SEO service, the first thing to do is to select the keywords you want to rank for.

Brainstorming keywords is the easy part of an SEO strategy, especially if you’ve been working in your industry for a while. One good way to identify keywords is to think of the phrases or the questions that potential customers ask when they’re considering purchasing your product.

Brainstorming: Think of questions your target customers may ask and the answers to those questions.

Keyword segmentation: Create topic groups for your keyword targets

Keyword research: Find keywords that fit within your topics and apply to your business and target customers.

Step 2: Think Like a Small Business—Value Over Flash

 

After identifying your keyword candidates, vet them using Google’s Keyword Planner.

 

When you use the Keyword Planner tool, it’s important to maintain the right mindset. The right mindset with the Keyword Planner tool is to think like a small business—trim and fit! Focus on getting value out of your dollar: What’s the least you can spend to get the biggest return? The wrong mindset to use with the Keyword Planner tool is to think like a large business. Large businesses focus on flash and what gets their website the most traffic exposure. Lots of small business owners make the mistake of getting into Keyword Planner and selecting keywords with the highest search volumes on Google.

This is a death sentence for small business SEO. Do not do it.

 

High-volume keywords are very competitive. They take lots of time and money to rank for, and even then, there’s no guarantee you ever will. I can’t tell you how many small businesses I’ve seen sink many months and thousands of dollars trying to rank for terms they have no chance with. It sets their SEO back and hurts their companies.

Step 3: Seek Out Lower-Volume, Long-Tail Keywords
One critical small business SEO practice is to keep an eye on search volume—the number of people looking for a keyword. Instead of going for high-volume keywords that lots of people are searching, seek out keywords with achievable (lower) search volumes

Here’s what that looks like:

 

 

This is a screenshot of Google’s Keyword Planner. I’ve circled a highly competitive keyword in red. Related keywords with far less competition are circled in blue. (There’s also a red “X” over the “competition” column. For the purposes of this discussion, let’s ignore that column.)

It’s important to note that the red-circled keyword phrases above consists of a single word: “SEO.” The blue circled keyword phrases consist of two words: “SEO marketing” and “SEO optimization.”

Long-Tail Keywords Are Attainable

If you want to start driving high-quality traffic to your website and find keywords with realistic search volumes, you need to seek out keywords with more search phrases, or “long-tail” keywords, over short ones.

A keyword like “small business SEO company” is exactly the kind of keyword a small business wants for multiple reasons:

Attainable Volume: The more terms present in your keyword phrase, the lower your search volume will typically be. “Small business SEO company” illustrates this perfectly. The terms here are in the same keyword family as the previous examples (SEO, SEO marketing, SEO optimization), but because it contains four terms rather than one or two, it has a lower search volume. For that reason, it’s going to be much easier to rank for and to drive traffic immediately with.

Higher-Quality Traffic: Longer keyword phrases also bring visitors to your website who are much more likely to take whatever action you want from them (making a purchase, setting an appointment, etc.) since searchers who use longer keywords usually have a very specific intent.

More Targeted Content: Longer-tail keywords also tend to foster more specific, useful content because most searchers have a very specific question in mind when they enter a search query that likely requires very specific content to answer. If your company can create content designed to address those questions, it will be read by high-intent visitors, receive inbound links, and ultimately climb Google’s search engine ranking pages.

Impact of Intent on Keyword Targeting

A good way to understand this concept of “intent” is to compare short and long-tail keywords. lf you’re the owner of a small SEO agency, and you’re looking for more customers, which keyword is more likely to help you accomplish your goal?

The ultimate lesson here is that long-tail keywords with high searcher intent will not only cost less money and time because of low volume, but it will also bring you better traffic. It wins all around.

Step 4: Use a “Less Is More” Mindset to Target Quality Keywords

Small businesses tend to put a lot more into marketing than they get out of it. Because time is the most valuable resource for small businesses, the best SEO strategy is to spend as little of it as you can to get to the first page of Google. Given the value of your time, “less is more” should define your entire mindset.

The basic premise of the “less is more” mindset is simple. If you optimized your website for 100 different keywords, no more than 10 of them would ever drive significant traffic to your site (and of those, two or three would drive the lion’s share of the traffic). The other 90 keywords would give you little drips of traffic here and there but nothing more.

With a “less is more” approach, you focus your energy on identifying that small handful of keywords that will get you results and cut out the rest. This means investing more time and effort in keyword research upfront to identify the best two or three keywords rather than trying to optimize for 10, 20, or more keywords.

This is a huge time saver and ends up netting you about the same amount of traffic that you’d get if you focused on lots of keywords at once.

–  Clutch.co