What makes a keyword good?
-
Having taken a day-long course not long ago, I'm new to SEO and I'm struggling to decide which keywords to target. I work in a really niche area: we make booking engines that allow travel agencies to sell flights, hotels, cars and other travel services online.
I know there are various tools on the web (and on Moz) which give you the average monthly searches and competition for each term but I still don't understand how to decide which ones to target.
For example, the term 'travel systems' gets a high amount of search and the competition for it is high. However, Google brings back results about prams and buggies so I think I should avoid this one.
Another is 'travel solutions' which gets a high amount of search and is low on competition. Google brings back results about travel agencies. This is more our area but our target audience is travel agencies so I'm not really sure I'd be attracting the right traffic?
I'd be really grateful for any advice that you can give me.
-
Hi There,
It's great that you're niche. This means that you don' really need to worry much about difficulty. I get frustrated with people talking all the time about 'difficulty'. It's self-defeating. You should go out there and write content that's so good it beats all the competition no matter how 'competitive' or 'difficult' the keyword. If anyone in my team said they were going to be dissuaded from doing something because it was 'too difficult' I'd send them to another team
So look at your competitors but don't blindly follow them. Speak to your customers, stakeholders and suppliers to discover the words they use. Are there phones that you can listen in to at your business? I listen to call recordings to get a feel for what language patients are using.
And at the end of the day don't worry too much about semantics. Google is very good now at figuring out what you are talking about so I would be tempted to just do some free thinking and try to write the most comprehensively, the most brilliantly and with the most detail about these products and your customers will find you.
If they are technical customer, write technically. Don't 'dumb it down'. Use the big complex words and include an FAQ section to pick up questions and long tail keywords (but beware of keyword stuffing)
Once you have written some content then you'll be able to optimise and analyse and test and get a feel for what is right and what people are searching for and reading about. The competitor research is just the start and in a really niche place you often just need to get things down and out there in the world and see how they perform.
Once you get cracking you'll soon become an absolute specialist and if you keep your eyes on the data you should be able to dominate your niche. Tight niches are great. You're lucky because broad or very high volume keywords can have problems all of their own.
-
Hello,
Obviously you're looking for a combination of volume, relevance and difficulty. Low volume keywords which are difficult to rank for are less attractive than high volume keywords which have a low difficulty.
That said, those high volume keywords need to be as relevant as possible. I would always suggest that your content and SEO focus should be around user intent rather than specific words.
If you start with a list of what your customer's user intent is, then add in what problems your product solves, you will very quickly have written your keyword list - some of those keywords may be long tail but I don't think it matters all that much.
Example:
"software for travel agencies"
"programs that allow travel agencies to sell bookings online"
"Best travel agency software"
"travel agency online booking software"
"software for online tour operators"etc
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Keyword List stuck on "Gathering Metrics"
Hello! I set up a keyword list over a week ago and the majority of the keywords still say "Gathering Metrics." Any advice on how to get this data to populate? Thanks!
Keyword Research | | mollykathariner_ms0 -
Different Blog Articles - What about Keywords Cannibalization?
Hi everyone, I have a question in regards to blog articles and long tail keywords variation. I usually create landing pages for the services of my business and create related topics for my blog with long tail keywords (tips, best practice, etc.). However, by using this method, I am a bit worried about the ranking of the different pages/blog posts. _(See Attachment - in this example, I tracked it with Serplab. MOZ keywords tracking is giving me the same result anyway). _ I created a blog post with a related topic 'office interior design tips'. Unfortunately, when looking at the ranking, the previous page (office-design) is not ranking anymore for this keywords and instead, the blog post office-interior-design-tips took his place. It moved from position 11 to 29 only because I created a blog post related to the topic. Therefore, what happened to the previous page? Does it stop to rank for this keywords once there is another blog post that is related to it? How can we avoid this fluctuation of ranking due to cannibalization? One can assume that by creating relevant content related to this topic, it should rank higher no? Thanks in advance for your answers. serp.png
Keyword Research | | Juvo0 -
How to use long tail keyword?
Hi I read in most of the SEO blogs that using longtail keywords can help us in our search rankings. But how can we actually get a traffic from longtail keyword if that particular longtail keyword is not having any search volume. For example, if I wanted to rank for the keyword "SEO" which has a huge search volume of 5,500 per month and if I wanted to concentrate on one of its longtail keyword "SEO basics for beginners" which has average search volume of only 40 per month, how can it help me?
Keyword Research | | sandeep.clickdesk0 -
Target multiple keywords on homepage?
Hello. I've got a situation in which I could use some help. A client is in the business of auto parts for European cars. He is VERY stubborn in wanting his homepage to rank 1st page for a keyword for each car brand, for example: audi autoparts bmw autoparts mercedes benz autoparts jaguar autoparts Basically, 15 keywords (one per brand) in total. How would you guys handle this? I can't seem to find a natural way to optimize a homepage for all these keywords at once. I've suggested landing pages for each brand/keyword, but he won't accept it. Is there anyway to do this or will this be a dispute with my client to convince him about the landing pages idea? Thanks a lot!
Keyword Research | | EduardoRuiz0 -
Keyword Research Tool
Which tool is most reliable to do Keyword Research ? I have observed that data in Google Keywords Tool seems to fluctuate a lot. For instance a particular keyword in GKT had an exact Global Search Volume of 2800 3 days back , today it is around 1200 . I can not make decisions on such unreliable data ...
Keyword Research | | iamnew0 -
Meta Keywords Dilution?
In general, does having a large number of meta keywords listed in a page's meta keywords line dilute effort? On other words, should I focus on optimizing for 1 or 2 keywords per page to keep my efforts focused and increase the probability of ranking better for those 1 or 2.....or should I put down all the keywords I would "like" to rank for? Thank You
Keyword Research | | NiallTom0 -
Keyword Research (dash or no dash)
I have a client that has been optimizing for "print and apply" for the past 5 months. Yesterday they decided it was more grammatically correct to use "print-and-apply." There question to me was "is this going to effect our SEO?" So... I checked the difficulty using the keyword analysis tool, both keywords had the same broad/exact adwords traffic as well as difficulty percentage. When reviewing the top 25 listings for each keyword it looks like the same sites rank in the SERPs between 1-8 and then after that it is completely different. So, is there a better keyword to target? Are these two keywords different enough to truly have separate search results?
Keyword Research | | kchandler
The top 8 results didn't even target "print-and-apply" in there content or title tags... Thanks for the input/discussion - Kyle0 -
How Many Keywords Should You Target Per Page?
What do you think is the most appropriate/efficient amount of keywords to target per page for a website? Obviously, it may depend on the type/size of the site, but I've noticed different results with different clients. Early on, I targeted way too many keywords per page, then scaled them back as I learned more. I'm almost starting to think that you should just target 1-2 keywords per page to be efficient and more natural. Thoughts?
Keyword Research | | MichaelWeisbaum0