Top Four Key Issues - You Need To Consider When Choosing Keywords For Your Domain

I have spent the last three weeks working with one of my new clients. They have been building their own website for over three years, spent $20,000 and have virtually no traffic. Like many people on the internet, they saw an opportunity to license some material from another company and did so in the promise they would make money. Yet to their distress they have never ranked well online and have never had high levels of traffic.

This particular client has spent thousands of dollars on building email lists using Adwords to assist in driving traffic their way. They are fast running out of money and becoming very distressed. The client has spent lots of money paying other people to get search engine traffic but has never achieved a good ranking and in some search engines did not even register an existence.

Two weeks ago we worked out what keywords would suit the licensed products that the client had purchased, built a website based on the sales pages the licensor had provided and using the right keywords this client has now achieved the most outstanding results.

The client achieved within 1 week of the site being live a #1 ranking in Yahoo.com on a keyword. A number one ranking is predicted to bring about 50 hits a day. The website also achieved a number 2 ranking in Google.com on a keyword which is predicted to bring about 150 hits a day. The reason our client achieved these outstanding results was simply because of the process we followed in choosing the right and appropriate keywords for the domain and key webpages. I should note that whilst the client will only pull about 200 hits a day on this one key world, we expect to make 3 to 5 sales a day for a $300 product. If you look at the numbers from the best case scenarios, the sales will pull $1,500 a day US which works out to about $10,500 a week and about $500,000 a year. Not bad for one single keyword.

There are four key issues you need to consider when trying to choose the right keywords for your domain name.

Issue #1 – Identify The Actual Words Your Customers are Using To Search For Your Products

One of the biggest mistakes many people make is to not do the research to identify the actual keywords your customers are actually searching on. In fact I have found that often what a client thinks their customers are using to search for their products is totally different to what their clients actually search on.

There are many tools on the market to help you do this and there are new ones coming out every week. My team and I use a range of tools like WordTracker and Overture to develop lists of keywords our clients customers are actually searching on. I find that Wordtracker is a fantastic tool for this.

When you are trying to use Wordtracker, I recommend that you start your searches with just a single general word about your product. This will give you a full list of all the words and a range of important information.

Issue #2 – Identify the Right Keywords with Minimal Competition

When you work with Wordtracker the system will give you a range of information about your keywords including the number of competing sites by search engine, the total number of hits per day in total to expect and a prediction of the number of hits per day by search engine. There are two issues you need to consider. One is the number of competitive sites for the keywords and the second is the number of hits you can expect.

The number of competitive sites is the most important issue to look. Keywords that have few competitive sites are much better to go after than those keywords that have lots of competitive sites as it can take a while to rank well. For example, my team and I have been going after a general term which currently has about 900,000 competing sites. The downside is that it takes a lot of work, lots of articles and a lot of time to achieve a number one ranking. In particular it has taken us 4 and half months to rank in the top twenty and we expect it to take another 2 months to get into the top five.

I know of one company that wanted to rank well for the keywords "wholesale hats" and that it took them 6 solid months of writing articles and building back links to be ranked well in the number one position. When you are starting out, you will want to make sure that you choose low competition websites. Now here is the interesting issue, just because a keyword has 1 million competing webpages does not mean that its going to be hard to rank well. What you need to do is to identify how many backlinks the top competitors has for the keywords. If the top competitor's webpages have only a few links to their page or even their site then you may find it very easy to top those webpages.

One of the aspects to consider when choosing your keywords is to make sure that your general keywords are in fact included in the domain name. For example if you were creating a website on Asthma, then in your domain name, you would want to include the keyword Asthma but it is unlikely you would get Asthma.com. However you would want to include the term asthma as the search engines give a better ranking to those that have the keywords in the domain, simply due to relevance.

Remember one key issue, the more relevant your keywords and domain, the more likely your website will rank highly.

Issue #3 – Identify Keywords with Good Daily Hits

The next issue you need to look at is the number of daily hits you can expect using those keywords. If the only keywords you can get with low competition webpages have 10 to 30 hits per day, then it is going to be a long haul.

The best type of keywords are those where you have a couple of hundred hits per day, preferably a thousand plus a day and only a few competing webpages. One of the sites we did for one of my clients had 350 daily hits per day but only had 104 competing webpages. This number of competing webpages is minute and it will not take a huge amount to get a top ranking position.

Issue #4 – See What Your Competitors Are Doing With Your Keywords

The next issue you need to look at is which keywords your competitors are using. When you are trying to work out your domain name you need to weigh up what your competitors are using to secure your customers, what keywords they are using in the keywords section of their meta data and what keywords they are using in their webpages and the text in their hyperlinks and their domains.

With all of this information you need to then balance out which keywords will give you the best results. Knowing what keywords your customers are searching on, which keywords have the least competition, what keywords your competitors are using and the total number of hits per day on your keywords will help you choose the right domain.

Oh and there is one other issue in all of this that you need to consider, is the domain with the keywords you have chosen still available?

Look the bottom line is that you want to build sites that are relevant and bring value to your customers and also to the search engines. If your websites do not do that then you will never be truly successful. All of the most successful websites in the world actually follow this credo.

About the Author:
Chris Le Roy
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