AIM Case Study: Keyword Selection

As we've finally got around to rebuilding our own web site, we thought that this may be a great time to share with you the rationale that goes into building a successful web site. We'll do this over a number of articles but for now we're going to start at the very beginning and look at a very important piece of web design, Keyword Selection.

As we've said on our web site, there is no point in having a great looking web site if nobody can find it. The simple fact of the matter is that the Internet is a very busy place and there are millions of web sites competing for the same coveted high ranking search engine (given Google accounts for some 80% of search traffic in the UK, when we say search engines, we really mean Google in all honesty) results on your keywords. So how do we go about choosing the right ones?

Let's use the AIM site as an example. Well, as a company we do web design. A quick search will tell you that Web Design and Web Site Design are the two most popular search terms so there we go, job done, article finished. Not quite.

The two key word phrases above are very, very popular with lots of established web sites competing for these terms; web sites that have been around for a while, have some solid backlinks and good, relevant content. You’re not going to want to go up against them for the most popular phrases straight away. Also, there will be a lot of people searching for 'web design' articles and ‘web site design’ blogs etc and who are not neccessarily buying customers.

So, that leaves us with two search engine terms that, realistically, it would be difficult to attain high rankings on and maybe are not going to actually generate us that much business. So what do we do?

Simple, we refine them to get key word phrases that will generate us customers and that we can attain good search engine rankings on. Choosing to go with phrases that are lower in search volume and lower in competition will almost always result in higher rankings faster and more buying customers. In the AIM example, we chose to refine them by Geography, targetting business in the Warrington and wider Cheshire area and we also added “web design company” as a more specific, lower volume phrase. These are our “buy phrases”.

There are many, many ways that you may want to refine keywords and keyword phrases . It will very much depend upon your business. At AIM, we do extensive research into this area using a number of popular tools to see what the most popular search engine terms are and which are on the rise and which are on the wane. We also take a view on the bigger picture as the search engine terms you may target now are not necessarily the same ones that you will want to target in the future. It is important that we do keep a similar theme, however, so we can embark on relevant link building from the onset.

We hope the above has given you more ideas on keyword selection and how to choose good keyword phrases. Contact us today on 01925 451166 or visit AIM Web Design to find out more about our keyword selection and web design service.

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AIM Case Study: Keyword Selection