SEO Keywords

When I was still working as a project manager for a website design company particularly handling an average of seven (7) optimization projects a week, the most misunderstood part of all the stages is the Keyword Research and Analysis.

Keywords are like the bread and butter of any search engine campaign there is in the online community. The universal rule in choosing keywords for your online marketing campaign is just simple – get the right ones and do not abuse them. So why is this part the hardest then, you may ask? Well then let me set the platform, allow me to site you some of my good and bad encounters in this area so for you to get the picture.

Client #1 – Mr. Boiler

Mr. Boiler owns a boiler repair and maintenance company in New York. He’s one beefy man who has only one thing in mind – get his competitor out of the way, in online marketing of course. While working on the optimization project for his website he related me stories about how long he’d been in this business yet his competitors are the ones making it big on the search engines. Clearly, he was in dire need to get something done on his site to be noticed. As I had explained the process, did the website analysis and keyword research, Mr. Boiler one day said he has his own list of keywords to use for the optimization. I was stunned. I though this man is really making a great deal out of this and so I took the list of keywords and re-checked them. With his “versus the competitor” in mind I checked the keywords using KeywordSpy (a keyword research tool most effective for finding competitors keywords) and reported the results back to Mr. Boiler. I explained to him that using a really substantial keyword generator – KeywordSpy – his keywords are no good. He was taken aback foremost. I realized that Mr. Boiler only took wild guesses as to what his prospective customers are typing in on the search engines without really doing any proper research and analysis on the keywords. So we went on with the optimization using the recommended SEO keywords from KeywordSpy and now he’s making waves in the rankings.

Client #2 – Mr. Limousine Florida

Limousine service is such a huge industry, and this is what I’ve been explaining to my client Mr. Limousine Florida. In my three years doing optimization projects, I could say I’ve handled almost a hundred limousine businesses already that dealing with them, as from experience, for the most part, is the hardest of all. Mr. Limousine Florida is a very meticulous client. Normally, I’d handle SEO development for the maximum of ten (10) business days only, but with him, time is out of topic. I spent like two weeks making him realize why we’re also using “limosine” – the misspelled “limousine” as part of the keywords (because it also has a fair share of results on the rankings. The word "limousine" is most commonly mispelled by searchers online), and why we need to add his target location if he’s only a local company, like if he’s only servicing the entire Florida, we’ll need to add Florida on the keyword “limousine service” and make it “limousine service in Florida”. In the end, we finished the optimization project for one month and with major post-project development assistance of course.

Keyword research doesn’t really have to be thought as a complex part of any optimization campaign, though it is considered tricky, still, if an SEO consultant, and the site owners themselves, would only understand the proper way to get effective keywords or would know which keyword research tool to be used in finding the best keywords then optimization would as easy as said and done.