Researching & choosing long-tail Keywords (1)

Stuck choosing long-tail keywords for your business’ SEO & SEM? We’ve put together a two-part guide with specific points to help with this process.

Below are the first 2 Steps for Researching and Choosing Long-Tail Keywords for SEO and SEM Campaigns.

1) Answer the question: What does my business do?

When you are intimately involved with your business it is hard to step away from it and see it through the eyes of a customer. An effective way to overcome this hurdle is to consult colleagues, customers, prospects, lost customers and others within the industry and / or target audience about what their perception is regarding what you do.

This type of discovery leads to the budding ideas for keywords to target with your SEO. Words are important. For the purposes of defining keywords, and when it comes to accurately describing your business they are everything.

Listen to the descriptions people have and use those colorful words to create an initial list of keyword ideas. Once you have a healthy list of keywords the next step is to perform some Google searches. Do you find companies that are competitors or in the same sector? If so, that is a good start, and it will help to dive into those search results to start building a list of keywords.

Keywords Formula = Business Services

2) Study the Competition

We will emphasize this point initially, study your competition, but don’t copy your competition. Draw inspiration from your competition, but don’t follow their exact footsteps.

Much of this competitor analysis is done using SEO tools, such as Ahrefs or SEMRush, but there are other ways of getting this type of information. For starters, look at their website. What is the meta description of their site? Do they have a blog? If so, what are they writing about specifically? All of these responses will provide a blueprint for how to proceed when it comes to compiling and editing your keyword list, as well as for building content around your business’ keywords down the line.

Find out more in Researching & Choosing Long-Tail Keywords Part 2.