ActiveRain Tutorials: Increase Blog Traffic- Understanding Your Keywords

Today we continue our series on how to blog and increase your blog traffic by discussing the subject of keywords.  In case you missed my last post, you can read it here and pick up a few more good nuggets on how to increase your blog traffic.

Keywords are by far one of the most misunderstood components for any blogger.  Usually they can pick out the few big keywords for a product/service, but have a very hard time finding the balance of terms that will rank well in the search engines as well as deliver a good amount of traffic to your site.  While it may be easy to dominate the first page of Google for a term like: “best real estate agent in Myrtle Beach South Carolina,” if that term receives less than 10 visits per month, is it really helping your business to spend time writing on that term? Granted, the leads that come directly from that are going to be very solid, your number of them will be few & far between.

On the other end of the spectrum, if I am in real estate, do I really want to try & rank for terms like Myrtle Beach Homes or Myrtle Beach real estate?  Those terms receive high amounts of traffic and and are going to be very difficult to garner page one results without a lot of work, content creation, and probably even hiring an SEO company.  Not to mention the quality of your lead is not very good either.  These broad general terms can generate lots of traffic, but very few transactions.  I remember an agent once that ranked for the top of the SERPS for a major term and got hundreds of leads each month.  He knew they were a waste of time, so he just handed them off to newbies in the industry and if they struck gold, collected a nice fat referral check.

So what should I be looking for in regards to keywords to increase blog traffic?

Take a look at this graph first to understand what section of keywords we are targeting:

We want to target the keywords in the green section to hopefully return the best results.  This means the terms that are showing a few thousand searches per month but not those with hundreds of thousands of searches.  They will deliver more traffic than those in the yellow with the quality of lead being better than terms in the red section. These terms are going to take a little bit of work to get to page one of Google, but will also send a few hundred hits to your site each month.  The leads will be a higher quality than the red section of our graph.  These people are not doing just general searches, they are doing searches that are more specific to a service or product and therefore are a little bit better quality.  When you see your site taking over page one of Google on these types of terms, that is when your phone will start ringing and sales will begin to skyrocket.

Determine Top 5 Keywords to Increase Blog Traffic and build from there.

The other day I was having a coaching session with a client, and we were developing the best keywords for his business.  He has invented a great piece of fitness equipment and hired me to assist him with his onlie presence.  I asked him to give me his top 5 keywords and from that we began to develop an in depth spreadsheet of keywords.  One of the keywords he gave me was “cheap workout equipment.”  I entered this term into Google Adwords and began to review the results.  The term “cheap workout equipment” is only being searched around 1,000 times per month, but a minor adjustment to “cheap exercise equipment” takes that number up to 8,100!   So, before you write your next post, take a few moments to determine what types of keywords to use.  A slight alteration can be the difference between 10 visits to your site and 1,000.

If you have any questions on how to increase your blog traffic through selecting the right keywords, feel free to ask in the comment section or contact me directly if you would like assistance determining the best keywords for your business.

Originally Posted at: 210 Consulting- Social Media Advisors