4 Questions To Ask Before Choosing Your Keywords

Hi,

I just thought I'd share some tips on how to choose your profitable keywords. Keyword research is very important whether it's free or paid traffic. The success of your online business depends heavily on what keywords you're going to optimize for. Let's take a look at 4 questions that you should ask before choosing your keywords.

Is It Relevant?
Your keywords should be relevant to your customer. Avoid broad terms like make money online, weight loss, dog training, panic attacks, etc. Why? It’s going to take you ages before you can rank for these type of keywords and typically the people who search for these keywords doesn’t have any clear idea yet on what they are searching.

Is There Any Traffic?
Most beginners think that they should only choose keywords that have huge traffic volume. Personally I like my keywords to have at least 2,000 monthly searches. But I would still go for a keyword that’s very targeted even if it has only less than 500 searches per month.

Is There Any Competition?
Like I said, you won’t stand any chance ranking for broad keywords (unless you have time). What you want to focus on is getting those long-tail keywords. If you see some authority sites in the top 10 results like About.com, Wikipedia, Amazon and other authority sites… the chances of your article or web page to rank in the first page is slim to none.

Is This A Buying Keyword?
Put yourself in the shoes of your target audience and imagine the keywords they would use if they’re looking to buy something. You can also search in forums in your niche and check out what words people are using to find a solution to their problems and desires.

These are some of the basic things I look for when choosing my keywords and I would love to hear your thoughts. Thanks for reading.

Great topic, Raymond!

I have a tutorial here on choosing keywords & phrases that fits with this topic as well. I like to go for the longtail keyword phrases (3+ word phrases) with very specific intent as they are easier to rank for AND result in higher conversion rates - because they are more specific queries.

I also discussed the informational vs commercial keyword phrases in this Affiliate Marketing Tips post. I look forward to the questions & resources in this thread. Thanks for taking the time to start it, and share some great insight!

Hi Lynn,

I'm definitely going to check out your article marketing tips series. Thanks for sharing.

Most welcome - would love to hear your thoughts ;)