The Best SEO Keyword Strategy – Picking SEO Keyword Fights You Can Win

All SEO keywords are not equally important—volume and competition matter!

True or false?

The most effective SEO keyword strategy is to compete vigorously for top placement for the most popular keyword suggestions returned by the Google Keyword Tool for a given root keyword phrase (Primary Keyword Phrase).

If you answered “true,” you might want to reconsider.

On the surface, aiming for the most popular SEO keywords seems like a good strategy. But in reality, it can be like trying to slay a dragon with a pea-shooter. The big guys with the bazookas may have you outgunned.

The little-known fact is, if your SEO keyword strategy is targeting only highly popular and competitive terms, your odds of SEO success are minimal. Alternatively, you might want to settle for aiming at smaller targets… and succeeding.

Here’s how to decide what’s a reasonable SEO keyword strategy for your website.

An effective SEO strategy begins with extensive research. Sure, you need to know the keyword phrases searched most frequently by customers in your market. But that information alone is not enough to guide your SEO efforts and create the right keyword-rich editorial content.

Additionally, you need to know how many searches are done each month on each individual keyword phrase in your keyword universe.

The simple but often overlooked truth is this: There’s a popularity contest going on within your keyword universe, and some keyword phrases are used much more often than others. That can create an intense competition — and often your website won’t have the gravitas to win.

You need to pick keyword fights you can win

If you do the math, you’ll realize that there is a keyword risk ranking inside each keyword cluster in your keyword universe, and this information can help prioritize your choices. You may discover that it is unwise to target the most popular keyword phrases, if there is a lot of competition for those phrases.

The best SEO keyword strategy might be to target keyword phrases that are more modest in popularity, and for which there is little competition.

To use an economic metaphor, you’re looking for modest demand and low supply.

The Google Keyword Tool can tell you the demand. The Keyword Competitive Index (KCI) reveals the relationship of demand to competition.

The KCI is your estimated annual search impressions (monthly average searches taken from the GKT times 12 months) divided by the number of exact match search engine results (the competition) at a point in time. Read more about using the Google Search Phrase Match command to find exact match search results.

Using the Keyword Competitive Index (KCI)

The “sweet spot” for your SEO efforts is often a keyword phrase with a high KCI. At Mequoda Daily, we generally consider any keyword phrase with a KCI of “1” or better to be a high value, low-risk target. Any keyword phrase with a KCI of .50 to .999 is a B-grade target. A keyword phrase with a KCI of .1 to .49 is a C-grade target. Anything with a lower KCI is not a reasonable target for Mequoda Daily and most of our consulting clients.

Here’s an example from Mequoda Daily.

One of our primary keyword clusters is membership websites. We publish a free report, Five Deadly Membership Website Mistakes, on a Rapid Conversion Landing Page (RCLP). Our keyword cluster for membership website includes 110 keyword phrases. The membership website cluster of 110 keyword phrases gets more than 968,532 searches annually.

On a simple broad match search (the type of search most users do), Google ranks Mequoda Daily 17^th among the 184,000 exact match pages it has indexed for the phrase membership website (singular). Google ranks Mequoda Daily 2nd out of 62,400 pages indexed for the phrase membership websites (plural).

Both phrases were successfully targeted (the RCLP plus 108 optimized posts on the topic of membership websites) based on the good but not great KCIs of .25 and .37. We have achieved a much higher rank for the plural version where both search volume and competition are much lower.

Note on the chart below (Membership Websites Top 10 Keywords for Mequoda Daily Network) that other more popular phrases like membership site and member site have not yet been targeted, based on their poor KCIs of .15 and .06.

The subtle power of “how to”

Here’s a tip that every online editor and copywriter should know.

Many people start their search by typing the words “how to” and a verb in the query box. Adding “how to” and verbs to your primary keyword phrases can result in optimal rankings.

The full Mequoda Daily GVR (Google Visibility Report) reveals a KCI of 37.71 for the phrase how to make a membership website, and a KCI of 1.42 for the phrase how to build a membership website. Mequoda Daily currently holds top 30 search results listings on more than a dozen variations of these two phrases that have enough volume to be tracked by Google and the GVR.

Takeaway: If you don’t consider volume and competition, your SEO success will be random.

The Google Visibility Report enables you to target, track and manage your SEO efforts and results. Over time, it will reveal whether your have correctly evaluated the risk of a particular SEO keyword target.

Perhaps most important, the GVR will enable you and your online publishing team to discover the best SEO keyword phrases to target for attracting the most high quality organic traffic to your website.

If you or someone on your team needs to learn how to build and use a Google Visibility Report for your online publishing business, join us at the Sixth Annual Mequoda Summit, April 1-3, 2009. Day 3 of the program is our new, hands-on SEO Workshop where you can learn how to build a GVR and use it to optimize your SEO keyword strategy.