We all know the crucial importance of choosing the right keywords for our SEO and PPC campaigns. Targeted keywords mean targeted traffic, and that can clearly play a key role in the success of your business.
But here’s the rub; not all keywords are created equal! There are a number of variables to consider with any given keyword. Which other companies are trying to rank for them? How many people are actually searching for them? And how much will it cost per click to get those people to your website?
In this article, we’ll talk about the benefits of finding low competition keywords, which are most likely to deliver a great return on your investment — and talk you through exactly how to do it!
The problem with high competition
Many beginners, perhaps understandably, look firstly at the search terms with the highest possible search volume. It makes sense, right? More searches mean more traffic, after all!
So, let’s say you’ve just started a marketing company. Your starting point might be to try and rank for the keyword ‘Marketing.’ But there are two major problems with this approach.
One is that it’s a highly competitive area. With around 167 million results for ‘Marketing’ on Google, it goes without saying that you’re in for an uphill struggle to get anywhere near page 1.
The other is that it isn’t particularly targeted. Just think about how broad a cross-section of people might search for ‘Marketing’ as a keyword. They could be interested in anything from print marketing to social media. They might be looking for an agency, tips to help market their own business, the latest marketing news or some examples of quality marketing campaigns. Basically anything to do with ‘Marketing!’
This simple example illustrates why going toe-to-toe with established leaders in highly-competitive keywords isn’t always the smartest approach — it can work, of course, but in all likelihood, it won’t drive the best results for your business.
So what’s the alternative?
As you might expect, then, the starting point for identifying low-competition keywords is to really zero in on your particular niche. There are two directions to go in here.
One is to choose what we’d call ‘medium-tail’ keywords — slightly longer than ‘head’ keywords like ‘marketing,’ but still enjoying a relatively high search volume.
The other is what we’d call ‘long-tail.’ These are considerably longer search terms which are likely to rank for less popular subjects or niches. By definition, the search volume is likely to be less for these subjects, but guess what — if you choose the right niche, it also means that you can drive really targeted traffic to your website at little or no expense.
Long-tail SEO has established itself as an attractive strategy to businesses looking for low competition keywords.
Keyword Research
The only way to ensure you’re aiming for the very best possible keywords for your business is to do your homework, in the form of keyword research.
Keyword research is all about finding keywords that are highly targeted, have a good monthly search volume, and relatively low competition.
Of course, if this was easy, everybody would be rocking SEO, but they’re not always all that easy to find. SEO companies are quick to capitalise on this kind of keyword and aim to utilise them on behalf of their clients. So effective keyword research means you have to be thorough, and consistent.
There are a number of tools out there you can use to do keyword research, but — with the best will in the world — not many of them are particularly fun to use!
Keyword suggestion tools will fire out list after list of potential keywords, but they only really tell you part of the story. The keywords themselves are just the tip of the iceberg, and require a bunch of extra research which is often a tedious and time consuming task.
The visual approach
Of course, we’re slightly biased, but we reckon that our visual approach to keyword suggestion is just about the easiest way in the world to identify the perfect keywords for your business.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could tell, straight away, at a glance, how competitive a keyword was from a PPC perspective, as well as how much search traffic it commanded? That’s where our keyword suggestion tool can help.’
Let’s say, for example, we search for ‘Marketing.’ Keywords are colour-coded based on their competition levels — from red for high PPC competition, amber for medium and green for low. And the actual size of the font indicates how many Google searches each keyword gets per month.
We’re looking for low-competition keywords (green) with high volume (large text) so right away we can see that the best options would be keywords like ‘marketing mix,’ ‘what is marketing,’ multi level marketing,’ ‘guerilla marketing,’ and ‘marketing mix definition.’
Keyword Eye also gives you the power to keep on top of what your competition is up to, analyse the keyword trends among top-ranking pages, a question finder to discover what questions people are searching for containing your keywords, and link analysis.
Best of all, you can sign up for your Keyword Eye account for absolutely FREE — and our Pro plan costs just £9.99 per month. If you’d like to find out more about how Keyword Eye can help your business then why not get in touch with us for a chat? We’d love to hear from you!