As you have learned in the previous lesson on Keyword Tools, there is a vast amount of data available regarding the keywords that people type into Google. The next step is for you to be able to evaluate the different attributes of a keyword before you decide whether or not to target one with your SEO strategy. 

3 things to know when choosing keywords

1. Relevance
2. Search Volume
3. Competition

Keyword Relevance

The first thing you need to do when deciding whether a keyword is relevant to your website is to ask yourself one simple question.

Does the keyword you found accurately reflect the products and services you offer? 

The number one objective of Google is to find and deliver the most relevant content to its users for a given search term. 

The best way to understand your customers’ search behaviour is to put yourself in their shoes.

• Using an example of Black Dress – If you were in the market to buy a black dress, how would you use Google? 
• You probably would not go to Google and type the word ‘black dress’ in and click Search
• You’d likely refine your search down to something particular that narrows down what you’re looking for, maybe like Camilla and Marc black dress

Understanding How Keyword Relevance Works

If you’re a website selling Camilla and Marc Black Dresses, and you have a landing page on your website dedicated to them the Googlebot will match that as relevant to the searches keywords...

Note: see the image below and note the URL Google has indexed is a dedicated page to 'dresses'

Hot Tip: Relevant keywords that have a matching landing page on your website are much more likely to drive conversion actions than any generic keywords. 

Understanding Keyword Volume

Search volume is the number of searches per month for a particular keyword. If you use the tool Google Keyword Planner, which you can find in Google Adwords under Tools > Planning > Keyword Planner

Select the option 'Get search volume and forecasts' on the right

Add in your chosen keywords and hit the 'historical metrics' tab - this will show you 12 months of data for the search term volume on both desktop and mobile.

Because this number is a rolling average, seasonality and other trend patterns are not accounted for. So if your business is seasonal, you’ll want to take a look at the Search Volume Trends feature in Keyword Planner, or even Google Trends when you’re analysing your keywords.

Keyword Competition

This step is analysing and figuring out how difficult it’s going to be for you to rank in front of your competition on Google search results page.

How to assess your keyword competition 

One way to look at competition is by evaluating the keyword in paid search results, to do this just perform a keyword search and see how many (if any) ads appear. If there are no ads, this would be low competition.

The best way to asses your keyword competition is to do this in Google Ads. 

The Google Keyword Planner has a competition column that shows you this. 

Hot Tip: If you download the list, you’ll actually get a much more accurate number on a zero to one scale for the competition metric. 

When starting out with SEO and keyword optimisation, it is a great idea to have a mix of high, medium and low competitive keywords, with high being the hardest to rank for and low being the easiest.

Hot Tip: If you add up all those relevant less competitive keywords together, you’ll find that you can be attracting lots and lots of highly relevant, likely-to-convert visitors to your website. So let your competitors spend all their budgets going after the keyword black dress, and let your keyword research be your guide as you balance how to get as much relevant search volume as you possibly can with the least competition.