Picking the Right Keywords for your SEO Program	Visited: 1878 4.2/5.0 (13 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Nick Stamoulis February 04, 2011

Picking the right keywords to target for your organization can sometimes be daunting if you think about the volume that some industries have. How to pick the right ones really comes down to analyzing your business model along with an attempt of stepping into the mindset of a potential keyword user to try and anticipate what type of person is bound to use that keyword. There are ways to determine if your keywords or working or not but it requires some due diligence.

Here are several ways to know if you picked the right keywords within your SEO program:

Conversion Tracking
Tracking your conversions is a great start. If you are using pay per click advertising you should be tracking all your conversions to see which keywords are generating business for you and which are not. At the end of the day this step is very important in order to find out where you are wasting your money.  Conversion tracking is also a must for your SEO program.  It is important to understand over time, which keywords led to conversions (sales, leads, phone calls, etc.).  This will help justify the continued growth of your long term SEO efforts.

Bounce Rate
I don’t mean just looking at the numbers of your traffic I mean looking at everything. Is traffic up? Is it down? If it is up how long are people hanging out on those particular pages? Bounce rate could either mean you have the wrong traffic or the wrong content which requires two different steps. If your traffic is hanging out on your website a little longer yet still no conversions of any kind than it might make sense to take a look at the site pages themselves from a content and design aspect.  It is important that visitors from the search engines do not immediately leave your website.

Keywords in Analytics
Your analytics information will show you which keywords are pulling in traffic to your website. It is important to look at this regularly because if you are loading up your site for optimization with certain keywords that are not pulling in traffic this data will tell you.

Having the right keywords is vital to the success of your SEO program, but you have to do it the right way and analyze things from time to time to make sure things remain on track and continue to grow.