Keyword Development Strategy – SEO Company Tips

As an SEO business owner you face the challenge of keeping multiple clients happy while working within their budgetary and technological guidelines.  You want to provide the best SEO services you can to get results for the client without breaking your own budget.  One of the best ways to bring SEO to clients is through effective and profitable use of keywords. In this posting I’m going to walk you through a few of the strategies and tips I use for finding the best keywords for clients and hope that I can show you a few tricks to help your SEO business as well.

First and foremost – what does the client or website you are trying to apply SEO techniques to provide?  Can you put it into one word – or better yet, let the client put it into one word.  For example, say you are working for a financial services company.  They offer insurance, mortgage and a variety of other financial tools.  How do you describe them in one word?  Finance?  Banking?  Wealth?  It’s not as easy as you might think – which is why it is so important to get your clients involved in the process.  Don’t try and guess at what the ultimate goal is that your client wants to get at.

Next, ask them to describe what they do in two words.  Then three, four and five.  Why are we doing this?  To give ourselves a good selection of keywords to use as a starting point for the client.  At this point we are letting them do a majority of the work.

Next, we want them to think of a competitor and then think of how they would find them using a search engine such as Google.  The only caveat is they cannot use any of the words they just used in the exercise above!

What’s the point?  We are trying to build a list of alternative keywords, brand keywords, competitor names and brands, as well as complementary keywords.  From our small “bucket” of keywords we started with we now have expanded to include a wide assortment of keywords that could potentially describe and/or help sell your clients website and services.

Now that we have all these keywords we want to take them and run them through Google’s Keyword Suggestion tool.  From this you are going to get a list of results that you will want to filter down and prepare to show your client.  This will cover most of the keywords we have already collected in the first steps along with a wide variety of alternative search suggestions.

In less than a half hour you have impressed your client by providing so much data based on such simple questions.  You help inspire confidence in your SEO firm with very little effort all on your part.  Of course now the trick is to take these keywords we have identified and identify how you want to order them and which words would be most effective.  We’ll cover that in a later post  — after all, we can’t give all our secrets away at once!