One of the main components that helps determine the success, or failure, of your search engine optimization (SEO) campaign is your keyword selection. Although this may not appear much, choosing the right keyword to use for your website is one of the more gruelling parts of the entire SEO process, especially if you aim to find one that will be most effective for your site’s search engine optimization.  

When using keywords for SEO, you just need to follow a few simple steps in order to properly find the right keyword that will do the job. There are also a couple of things that you need to look out for in order to avoid any problems when trying to optimize your web page. 

Make a list 

The first thing that you should do if you want to be able to use keywords effectively is to start out by making a list of “key” keywords or phrases that are relevant to the content of your site, and by doing this, it can actually lead you to create or discover more keywords or phrases that may blossom from the original one that you have chosen.  

Select key phrases or words 

Once you’ve made a list, try to select ones that contain a “key” keyword or phrase that can help you identify your site’s content. Let’s say your site’s content is all about cars, using cars as a keyword won’t put you high up in the page ranking of search engines, especially since a lot of sites or pages have that as a keyword. Try to avoid using words or phrases that are too general, as this will not help improve your page ranking. By adding other key terms to your chosen keyword, such as “second-hand cars”, or “second-hand sports cars” will actually help improve your chances of going up higher in the page rankings. Just make sure that these are relevant to your site’s content. 

Check your competition 

It also helps if you took the time to search for keywords or phrases that your competition is using so that you can narrow down which ones to use, and which ones to avoid. There is no sense in using a type of keyword or phrase, such as “cars”, which a lot or most of your competition are using as well, and if their sites are ranked high up in the search engine’s index, then you might have a difficult time going up against that. 

Use your location 

You can also improve your chances of getting a much better page ranking result if you incorporate your location to the keyword or phrase that you are trying to use. Let’s say your business is located somewhere in Minnesota, by simply adding the word “Minnesota” to your keyword selection (“Minnesota second-hand sports cars”), you can fair better in your page ranking. However, this type of method usually entails that people are planning on seeing you in person when they do searches like this, so make sure that you only utilize this technique if you are open to the idea of them visiting you in person.  

Use your niche 

Always try to choose the keyword that you specialize in, or at least the one that offers you with the most profit. Keep in mind that you want to offer the keyword that best describes your business, but if the search volume of users is leaning towards one that isn’t your main product, then you can actually opt to use that keyword instead, just as long as that keyword is still related or relevant to your site’s content.