How do I figure out which keyword to optimize for?

[tennisround]

What's up guys!

We run a site for tennis players and courts in the whole country - http://www.tennisround.com/. People use the site to find a tennis partner at their skill level and send each other invites to set up matches, it's also used to find local tennis courts.

The question is - Which keyword(s) should we optimize the site for and how?

Cheers,

Alex

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[MarieHaynes]

I think your design looks great!

[tennisround]

Thanks Stephen! What do you mean by "make your design higher quality and less spammy"? Is there anything that could be considered spam by the users or the engines?

[EGOL]

Nice... I went to the site and it recognized my geographic location and showed nearby tennis courts.

I would optimize for "tennis courts in Philadelphia" and similar local geographic terms.

However, I think that there would be a lot of potential for advertising via site targeted adwords or targeting tennis players on Facebook.

[firstconversion]

"find a tennis partner" "tennis partner" "tennis court" "book tennis court" "tennis competition"

You are in the same position as many startups; there is not really any search volume for what you do as its so new and you need to build your audience from the ground up

You may rather wish to put your energy into social media and direct connections with tennis clubs (so make you twitter/facebook bigger with CTAs, and get rid of myspace ) Maybe Linkedin actually works well with this idea

I would suggest soft url hijacking of tennis club names. To that end, this url needs a hell of a lot more content http://www.tennisround.com/tennis-courts/tx/austin/lost-creek-country-club I would go out to the clubs or get them to send you images and video and any specials and competitions they may run

Also make your design higher quality and less spammy, then you will appear miles ahead of crap like this

http://www.letsplaytennis.com/

http://www.tennispartner.co.uk/

http://www.globaltennisnetwork.com/tennis-community/find-a-tennis-partner

From experience working with a startup, its easy enough to get traffic and signups, but getting actual engaged users is the real key to success. The 3 sites above may get organic traffic, but who comes back a second time?

S

[SebastianDyer]

Try to think about words and phrases that sum up what your site aims to achieve. Then look at doing the following:

• find out what your top compeititors are trying to optimize for

• using Google adwords to get keyword suggestions

Although I do tend to select keyword to optimize when I undertake a campaign, I'll usually let a lot of the keywords be dictated in a natural way (e.g by natural backlinks).  Usually I''ll focus on building the link profile and domain authority so that ranking for a variety of keywords becomes easy.