Comments on: Selecting Keywords for SEO: A Quick Guide for PR and Social Media Pros http://www.buzzstream.com/blog/pr-social-media-keyword-selection.html Thu, 22 Apr 2010 15:59:45 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: Jeremyhttp://www.buzzstream.com/blog/pr-social-media-keyword-selection.html/comment-page-1#comment-780 Jeremy Mon, 24 Nov 2008 23:54:33 +0000 http://www.buzzstream.com/?p=265#comment-780 Hey Pam, if you're working with a large set of prospective keywords, I wouldn't expect that the strategy of writing a general post to test rankability would work except for the most obscure and least-searched terms.What you can do is screen your list in Hubspot or Wordtracker by competitiveness. Those tools have a competitiveness score that can tell you which ones are just too competitive for you.The long-tail is a no-brainer because all you really have to do is build content and you'll rank.It's the magic middle that gets you-- the terms where there is some competition, but the big unknown is really how valuable they are likely to be. That's where you'd want to use the approach outlined above to calculate your conversions by keywords. Then you should just aim at ranking for the terms with the highest value and pay less attention to their competitiveness. Like you suggest, there's really no way to know how you'll do until you try.So overall this strategy says: don't waste time on the terms that are too competitive or the terms that are least valuable to /you/ as measured by a PPC campaign with conversion testing. Hey Pam, if you’re working with a large set of prospective keywords, I wouldn’t expect that the strategy of writing a general post to test rankability would work except for the most obscure and least-searched terms.

What you can do is screen your list in Hubspot or Wordtracker by competitiveness. Those tools have a competitiveness score that can tell you which ones are just too competitive for you.

The long-tail is a no-brainer because all you really have to do is build content and you’ll rank.

It’s the magic middle that gets you– the terms where there is some competition, but the big unknown is really how valuable they are likely to be. That’s where you’d want to use the approach outlined above to calculate your conversions by keywords. Then you should just aim at ranking for the terms with the highest value and pay less attention to their competitiveness. Like you suggest, there’s really no way to know how you’ll do until you try.

So overall this strategy says: don’t waste time on the terms that are too competitive or the terms that are least valuable to /you/ as measured by a PPC campaign with conversion testing.

]]> By: Pam O'Nealhttp://www.buzzstream.com/blog/pr-social-media-keyword-selection.html/comment-page-1#comment-779 Pam O'Neal Fri, 21 Nov 2008 15:22:46 +0000 http://www.buzzstream.com/?p=265#comment-779 Great advice Paul. Another area that interests me is understanding how to balance your selection between high volume/highly competitive terms and long tail terms.We've had a pretty easy time achieving results on Google for our long tail terms, but have found that we could invest too much time without capturing much value on some highly competitive terms.The question that always plagued me was: How big is too big when you are working with limited resources? Should I go for big results on lower volume keywords or go for the gold and climb to the top on a high volume terms? As a type A, you can imagine my preference but my SEO guy was not always so thrilled with that notion because it takes so long to know whether you will see results.You can continue struggling for that term for weeks or even months before figuring out you didn't have a chance because Google didn't/doesn't?? crawl typical webpages for weeks. Not sure that's still true? One of the tricks we used to test our possibilities was to post content optimized for a broad keyword on a social media site or our blog (those are cached in just days) to see how we fared. With that we had an idea of the results we could attain with a little effort. Not sure if this is a good idea or if it is even current as SEO changes so rapidly. Thoughts? Great advice Paul. Another area that interests me is understanding how to balance your selection between high volume/highly competitive terms and long tail terms.

We’ve had a pretty easy time achieving results on Google for our long tail terms, but have found that we could invest too much time without capturing much value on some highly competitive terms.

The question that always plagued me was: How big is too big when you are working with limited resources? Should I go for big results on lower volume keywords or go for the gold and climb to the top on a high volume terms? As a type A, you can imagine my preference but my SEO guy was not always so thrilled with that notion because it takes so long to know whether you will see results.

You can continue struggling for that term for weeks or even months before figuring out you didn’t have a chance because Google didn’t/doesn’t?? crawl typical webpages for weeks. Not sure that’s still true? One of the tricks we used to test our possibilities was to post content optimized for a broad keyword on a social media site or our blog (those are cached in just days) to see how we fared. With that we had an idea of the results we could attain with a little effort. Not sure if this is a good idea or if it is even current as SEO changes so rapidly. Thoughts?

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