Keyword research is the backbone of all SEO projects. The success of your website depends upon finding and targeting the best key phrases for your niche. If you do not put the research in then all your SEO efforts might be wasted chasing non-existent, low quality traffic. Your business needs to get the keyword facts before any optimisation is attempted. Over the next few weeks I will be going through the keyword strategies used here at JumpStart Marketing.
Did You Know?
Keyword targeting in SEO is restricted by the size of your website. The bigger the site the more key phrases you can target. At most 2-3 keyphrases should be used on each page. If you target more key phrases on a page you are in danger of diluting the overall effectiveness of that page. Therefore, if you have a 10 page website you will only be able to target 20 -30 keyphrases. Many of the pages on your 10 page website would make poor landing pages, so in reality you might only have 5 – 6 quality pages to target with your important keywords. In order for your business to target more keywords you need to create more web pages. A 40 – 50 page website of highly useful content can help you to target 100+ important key phrases. It is clear that landing page creation is an essential element of your SEO Strategy.
Search engines treat each web page individually
It is not just your index page that ranks highly in Google. Each inner page is analysed individually and if it is judged to be the most relevant page to the search query then it is displayed in the search result. When people search they are looking for relevant information. If I am looking to buy a printer I want to be brought to the printer specific page and not the general computer homepage. There will be a lower bounce rate if I am brought to the information I want. Treating every page of your website as potential landing pages is important. As each web page is judged individually by Google, each page should have unique key phrases assigned to them. This allows you to greatly increase the number of keywords your business is targeting.
In practice, there tends to be a far greater amount of possible key phrases than web pages. Landing page creation can be slow with most clients. Given the choice of optimising pages like your contact page, sitemap page, about us page for different keywords or leaving them un-optimized, I would always optimise them. Use these pages to target less important keywords. True, they do not make good landing pages and they will have higher bounce rates, however, I feel it is better to rank for something than not to rank at all. Each visitor that finds your site through the contact page keywords has the potential to click through onto other website pages to find what they want. They might have got into your shopping centre through an emergency entrance but they can still find the shops.
Key Points
• Treat every page of your website as a possible landing page
• Target web pages with unique key phrases
• Choose 2 – 3 key phrases and assign them to each web page.
• If there are no relevant pages then create them.
• Expand your website to target your keywords.
