If you have an online brand, then you are most likely utilizing search engine optimization. The movers and shakers in the SEO game who got in early are now generating an incredible amount of organic traffic. The secret to executing a well-organized SEO campaign is the keywords. Understanding what the keywords are and how to use them is a crucial part of the SEO campaign. Read on to discover how to find the right keywords to build your campaign around and how to use them to generate massive amounts of traffic and get your site on the front page of the search results.

Research Keywords

One thing that people sometimes have a hard time understanding is the importance of the research behind the keywords. You can’t just pull keywords out of the air or use the top three in a single Google search. There are plenty of online tools available to generate keywords around a specific niche or industry, so use them. It is also essential to measure the metrics behind the keywords, so you know how much traffic and what type of queries surround each possible keyword. It is better to take the time to research up front because a campaign surrounding the wrong keywords will get you nowhere.

Understand The Types Of Keywords

SEO is not new which means that single words and phrases less than four words which perform well are pretty much out of the picture. Words such as “coffee” or “health and fitness” have saturated the internet, and it would take a considerable amount of time and money to build a successful strategy around either of them.

The sweet spot is in the long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are keywords with four words that are specific to an industry or a niche. For instance, the keyword “shoes” has huge competition and returns millions of pages in a search query. However, the words “sketchers memory foam women’s” returns far fewer searches. There are still plenty for SEO purposes, but there is a small enough amount that you can quickly capture lots of organic traffic around this long-tail keyword.

Keyword Planning Tools

Google has the best free keyword planning tool on the internet, but they are plentiful. If you decide to use Google’s keyword planner you have to sign up for an Adsense account to access it, but it doesn’t cost anything. Once you have located the keyword planner, you want to find long-tail keyword phrases that generate between 10,000 and 50,000 hits per month. Your goal is to identify the three best keyword phrases for your brand that fit into the 10,000 to 50,000 hits per month range. Remember that each long-tail keyword probably has hundreds of variations, so you need to find the ones that will work best for your brand.

Don’t Keyword Stuff

You will have to use these long-tail keywords a lot on your website and your blog to generate results. You do need to be careful not to keyword stuff. The long-tail keywords need to be placed strategically and flow naturally while still being found by the search-bots. If you have chosen the appropriate long-tail keywords and set them correctly throughout your site, you will begin to generate organic traffic.

It can also be a good idea to talk to friends or colleagues who may have run SEO campaigns of their own. They can help you decide if the keywords you chose accurately represent your brand and will generate the amount of traffic you are seeking.