The Meat & Potato of Every SEO and SEM is Keyword Research

I just had a time discussing Key Research module to my Satellite SEO Team and it is always refreshing to go back to the basics of SEO or SEM. It may be basic but I think is the most important aspect of SEO that every search marketer should FULLY understand .

I always say that the “meat and potato” of every search engine marketing or search engine optimization is a solid Keyword Research. I may have said that differently or you may have heard/read that many times but there should always be an exclamation point to it.

There are many ways on how to approach keyword research and there is no one-dimensional process written about it. Search Opt Media as an SEO Company in the Philippines takes on the keyword research maybe differently compared to others but let me illustrate it to you.

There are different factors that affect our keyword selection process.

1. Search Volume

2. Competition

3. Competitive Advantage of clients

4. Profitability

5. Relevance

Search Volume

Search Volume is the number of monthly searches for the said keyword being researched. Having almost zero search volume is tantamount to having no interest for search engine users. I always tell my team not to waste their time on it because there is no use to optimize on bid on keywords that is without people searching for it.

Competition

We have to admit that the internet especially the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) is a “Red Ocean”. As an SEO company we always look into the amount of competition in selecting the keywords for our clients. Knowing such, we know what kind of competition we are about to get into. We explain to our clients the amount of efforts and time frame estimates that we can see improvement in traffic, ranking and conversion. Thus; you get to manage the clients’ expectations. This also serves as one of our basis for costing for our SEO plan.

As opposed to the usual SEO packages you see out there which I find to be dubious in my personal opinion because they make it appear that if you get a Gold or a Platinum SEO package, you get this amount of work and expected outcome. An unsuspecting client would normally find it cheap or that feeling of certainty that they will get their ROI in no less amount of time thus; they sign for it. But gee! Any sane SEO company out there, would not want to compete to the global travel niche industry with those off-the-shelf SEO packages. Usually this tactic to lure SEO clients, would normally get them into trouble because clients expect results in no less time.

Next stop, I will tackle competitive advantages of clients, profitability and Relevance.