Keywords play a crucial role in any on-page SEO strategy, making the content your target audience appreciates as appealing to search algorithms. Fortunately, a lot of online marketers aren’t quite sure which keywords they should be ranking for to begin with says Chris Poole from CT SEO Company . Coming up with a well thought out, targeted list of keywords is the first step to achieve on-page SEO success, powerful enough to convert visitors into leads. This means that the first thing you should do when it comes to your SEO efforts is to come up with a list of keywords you want to rank highly for and the following recommendations will help you do it.

• Pull your keywords from your current marketing materials and content, also using the words that you use to describe your services or products.
• Type the keywords you’ve gleaned from your marketing materials into Google. Next, scroll down to the bottom of the page, to find out what other, relevant search terms Google recommends.
• If your business has a brick and mortar location, beside the name of your city, add the names of surrounding cities to your prime keywords for targeted variations.
• Generate a list of high-performing keywords from your marketing automation program.

Once you come up with a list of keywords, which will more than likely be long, you’ll need to edit it down. Refine your list of keywords to those that are most likely to drive the right kind of traffic to your content.

Weed Out Keywords that Aren’t Relevant

This may seem like an obvious recommendation, but it’s important that you remove keywords that aren’t really related to what you have to offer, or what your “perfect” customer probably would search for. For instance, if you sell handcrafted jewelry, you wouldn’t want to use “make handcrafted jewelry” as a keyword. You’ll end up with droves of DIYer’s looking for instructions – not jewelry.

Sorting Keywords

It’s important to sort keywords based on the level of competition and volume. For example, a keyword might be a relevant and popular search term, but if everybody is using it, it will end up getting diluted, meaning you’ll have a difficult time achieving a high ranking with it. On the flip side, if a keyword doesn’t have a significant amount of competition, however, nobody searches for it, there’s no point using it. The best SEO strategy with keywords is to find the ones that are relevant, that ranks high in search volume yet isn’t very competitive.

Don’t Bother Using Branded Terms

If one of the keywords on your list is a competitor’s brand name, you may not want to target it. If most of the results on the first-page are for your competitor’s website, blog, social sites, etc., you’ll more than likely be wasting your time. Consumer’s typing in the brand’s name are more than likely specifically looking for your competitor anyway.

If you’re working with a SEO strategy that didn’t start with keyword research, start over. If you do, you’ll achieve real, success driven results.