Building an SEO campaign requires a significant investment of time, money, or both. But increasing your organic search ranking can be a powerful opportunity for your business to grow and develop. Search engine optimization increases your visibility, trustworthiness, and user experience.

But before you go running out to the nearest SEO agency, there are some things you should consider. You could spend thousands of dollars a month, but not see an extra dime in revenue if you don’t have a properly defined strategy.

Today, we’ll look at how to pick the right keywords to ensure that your SEO efforts are not wasted. Picking the right keywords is essential to any SEO strategy that seeks to grow revenue. And that should be all of them! We’ll address keyword selection under four headings: value, relevance, feasibility, and extensiveness.

Valuable Keywords

First and foremost, your target keywords should be tied to what drives your revenue. This seems like an obvious point, but too many businesses chase rankings that won’t help them win conversions. Throwing money into SEO efforts that only boost your ego isn’t a sustainable strategy for long-term growth.

This doesn’t mean that every keyword needs to be all about sales. But you should have a clear path from click to conversion for every targeted keyword. Whether the content is your homepage or a blog post, you should understand how investing in ranking a page will lead to more profits for your company.

It might be a top-of-funnel page that is primarily about building awareness. Or it might be a product page just one click away from a purchase. But no matter where the content falls in your sales funnel, you should have an understanding of how improving your SEO will affect your conversion rate.

Relevant Keywords

Second, picking the right keywords means picking relevant keywords. When looking for keywords that are relevant to your industry, consider the search intent of your ideal customer. What questions are they asking? And where does your service touch on those answers? This creates a two-fold relevancy –  relevance for your target audience and also relevance for your unique selling proposition.

Spend a good amount of time determining what topics are relevant to your target audience. Then use that information to craft keyword rich content that gets to the heart of their burning questions. It’s worth mentioning here that your content should be built around quality topics – not just thinly veiled attempts to use keywords. It isn’t 2006, after all.

Once you have topics built around your target audience, you should put your spin on them based on what sets your brand apart. This will give you two angles on picking the right keywords: one from the customers’ point of view and one from your brand’s point of view.

Feasible Keywords

This is an important consideration that is easy to overlook. The keywords you choose to target need to be feasible given your resources. Here at Fusion Group USA, we’d love to rank number 1 nationally for ‘web design agency.’ But, given the millions of other people who want the same thing, we’d be spinning our wheels to target that keyword.

For many keywords, your intuition is enough to guide you. A mom-and-pop shop probably doesn’t have the resources to compete for a keyword when the SERPs are dominated by massive corporations like Amazon. To determine this type of feasibility, a quick search for your targeted keyword should give you an idea of its competitiveness.

For a nuanced look into your keywords, an SEO agency has tools to determine the difficulty of any keyword. This will allow you to target keywords that are both valuable to your bottom line and feasible to win given your resources.

Broad Keywords

Fourth, you should pick keywords that can be used naturally and broadly. As I said earlier, it isn’t 2006 anymore. And that means that you don’t need to worry about using exact match keywords at some pre-established rate. Instead, you should pick keywords that lend themselves to a broad range of semantically related usage. A lot of SEO tools will push you to a certain level of usage, but they’re running on outdated concepts.

The search engine algorithms are smart enough to tell that ‘picking the right keyword’ and ‘choosing helpful keywords’ mean the same thing. There is no need to artificially force one of those phrases into your content at the expense of the other.

In fact, you shouldn’t be forcing any words into your content. Think of targeted keywords as topical guides, not exact words to shoehorn into every paragraph. When you take a broad approach, you will find your content is more user-friendly while the bots still understand your topic easily.

Keywords, SEO, and Your Business

Creating a successful SEO campaign doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a commitment to planning, execution, measurement, and re-adjustment. Some basic search engine optimization is possible on your own (including keyword-based content). But some of the more advanced SEO tactics will require a professional agency to help.

If you’re ready to see your search engine rankings climb for topics that are important to your business, then contact Fusion Group USA today.