Creating an optimized keyword campaign should be the first step in creating an internet marketing strategy. Depending on the competition, an optimized keyword campaign can be a very time consuming process. Selecting the correct keywords to shoot for has as  much to do with traffic volume as it does with relevance to your business. Before you begin researching search terms, begin by first analyzing your company and services. You will need to assess what are your strengths, weaknesses and what you do different than your competitors. Write these down in 3 different lists and begin to study what trends begin to appear. You will begin to base your research on the trends that arise from these lists.

The reason for search term research is that it helps you to target the right type of traffic. By basing your keywords on your company strengths, you can begin to find out what type of visitor is ideal, what they are looking for, and what type of visitor is most likely to convert into a paying customer. Remember, it is not about how many people visit your site, it’s about how many people become customers. This area or research will help you to apply more direct keyword phrases that are most likely to help you convert customers than general terms or phrases. For example: A visitor searching for “apple Ipod 3g s cost” is most likely looking to buy an ipod as opposed to a visitor who is searching “apple ipod.” This is because the first person is already at the stage of looking for prices while the second visitor may be looking for general information.

Next, look at your second list with your company weaknesses. This will give you a choice to either try to improve on your weaknesses attracting new customers, or to avoid marketing to these customers and focus your attention elsewhere. If customers are currently turned away from your company due to your weak points, then don’t highlight them and focus on what you are good at. This train of thought will also help you to develop a profile for your “anti-client” this is the type of person you do not want to attract. They are the ones who may spend time on your site, but never convert into clients. Try to think of why this person may have stumbled upon your page and point your strategy away from this point. Sometimes finding the direction not to go, can point you to new paths. You may set up a list of keywords to avoid. These are the words your anti-client will likely search. Make sure to study these terms, and find out what nuances set these people apart. It may be that your “anti-client” may be looking for additional information that you can easily provide or they need a product that you don’t yet supply. Both of these circumstances can be fixed to increase your odds of conversion, but you must first find out if making changes to cater to these anti-clients is worth the effort and investment.

Begin your external research by looking at your competitors’ websites. Look at each page and find out what terms they are using. If a term appears more than 3 times in a page, chances are that this term is important and this is what they are shooting for. Try to build a list of these terms and study trends in between them. You can also look at the source code of the webpage directly from your browser window (In firefox, go to  >view>page source). Towards the top of the code you will most likely find a <meta name = title>, <meta name=description>, and <meta name=keywords>. A well optimized site will have all 3. Read them and you can get a better idea of what keywords the website is optimizing for. Do this for all of your competitors and try Google searching some of these terms. Find out who is coming up on top and try to find out why.

Now it is time to begin your research for your own keywords. Now that you have a list of words not to use, words your competitors use, your weaknesses and your strengths, you can begin to develop a good plan. You will likely want to develop a plan that will simulate what your competitors are doing, but you want to do it better. Begin by entering a few popular keywords used by your competition into Google’s free keyword tool. This will give you the amount of people searching these terms per month, and will provide a lot of other related keywords. You can convert this list into an excel file in order to easily edit it. Repeat this process for all of your lists until you have 4 excel files. Then begin to eliminate words that are not specific to your market or are too general to be effective. Organize and lump your phrases together by similarity or subject. Then organize them by search volume. Words with a very high search volume will not work for organic optimization, but can work for your Adwords campaign. Words with very little volume may not be worth optimizing for unless they are very highly targeted for conversion, ie: “buy apple ipod 3g s”.

Now that you have a comprehensive set of lists, try to refine them more until you have about 3 key phrases per page on your website. These should be middle volume phrases that are highly targeted. These will be words that are going to be good candidates for organic search engine optimization. Remember to add the Google analytics code in your website in order to track your optimization efforts. It may take about 3 months to see organic results, and you can change out words that may not be working based on your analytics. Stick to the words on your list, and you will begin to see success. Make sure you incorporate these words into your titles, descriptions, alt tags, and headlines in addition to your content.

We hope you have found this information useful in creating your online marketing campaign. San Diego Pay Per Click Adwords clients have a great resource in Saba SEO. Be sure to follow our feed for frequent updates and for more useful information for all businesses.