How to Find Best Opportunity Keywords

Keywords are traffic drivers. Finding the best opportunity keywords will give your site the very best chance of outranking your competitors and driving more targeted traffic to your site.

Whether you are a new start-up, or an established business, we recommend keyword research is conducted before creating your SEO strategy. You will need this insight to make informed decisions about which keywords to focus on that will help your business to grow.

Keyword Research Analysis

A Keyword Research Analysis identifies which keywords will give your site competitive edge and more visibility in organic search results. Using these keywords throughout your website content, and by tagging videos and images will help to drive highly targeted traffic to your website, not just in Google Search but also Google Video Search and Google Image Search.

Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI)

In selecting keywords for optimisation, it is best practice to choose keywords which are likely to drive the most targeted traffic to your site, and those which have higher KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index).

KEI measures the number of searches for each keyword and its bid competition co-efficient to get a great estimate of the effectiveness of that keyword. The higher the KEI the better, as this indicates less competition and higher search volume.

Low KEI Scores = High Competition and Lower Opportunity
High KEI Scores = Low Competition and High Opportunity

If you are in a very competitive sector, it is likely that the KEI scores will be very low, indicating a high level of competition. This means it will be challenging to gain rank and visibility for these keywords organically.

If all the keywords you want to use are showing low KEI scores it is wise to adapt your research to instead focus on search trends, search volume and relevancy.

Search Trends

It is worth spending some time looking at how popular your important keywords are over time. Google offers a really useful free tool https://trends.google.com/trends/?geo=GB where you can explore what the world is searching for. You can select a time period in hours, months or years, going back as far as 2004. It will show you the search trend over time and also if related topics and queries are rising in popularity or in decline.

Search Volumes

Search Volume is a metric that measures the amount of users per month who type a word or string of words into a search index. Search Volume can be segmented by different search engines, by device and also by geographical location.

Relevancy

It is really useful to understand which keywords have higher search volume as these are likely to be your best traffic drivers, however, the traffic landing on your site may not be as engaged with your content as the ‘context’ of the search may be quite loose. Whereas more niche keywords, albeit will perhaps lower search volume, could prove to be much more efficient in driving conversions as they are likely to attract much better targeted traffic.

The most relevant keywords tend to be what we call ‘longtail keywords’. These are keywords that have 3 or more words in the phrase, so making the keyword much more specific.

For example:

Broad keywords that will have a high search volume, and although relevant, may not lead to a conversion:

+shoes
+ladies +shoes

Longtail keywords that are more specific with lower search volume so will attract a more targeted audience who are more likely to lead to a conversion:

+red +ladies +shoes
+high +heeled +ladies +shoes

Local SEO Strategy

If you are targeting a local audience, it makes sense to work on optimising your site predominantly to drive local traffic, however, search volumes tend to be much lower.
It is therefore best practice to have a combination of more general, broader, keywords in your keyword strategy combined with geo-targeted keywords that will attract local traffic.

For example, if you run a local plumbing business in Basingstoke, a good keyword strategy will be:

+plumbers
+plumbers +basingstoke
+boiler +repairs +Basingstoke
+gas +safe +boiler +repair +basingstoke

Combining broad keywords with geo-targeted and longtail keywords will increase your local search visibility as you will be gaining rank and more traffic for higher traffic keywords, as well as for local keywords.

Whizz Marketing in Hampshire is your go-to Keyword Research Expert!

Our Keyword Research Analysis will provide in-depth insight into keywords that are important to your business. We will assess how your site is performing, how it is currently positioned in organic search, and then in conducting some keyword research, we will create a strategy that will help your site to gain increased search visibility, rank and drive more traffic in 2023.  Request your Keyword Research Analysis Today!