Should You Use Top Searched Terms As Keywords?

A common question for those starting out in online business is about the types of keywords you should use. Many people think that all you need to do is to identify the top searched terms in your niche and use those. But things are not that simple …

For well established businesses with good rankings on search engine results that can be an appropriate strategy. They are strong enough to cope with the high levels of competition that exist for popular search terms. But for a relatively new online business it will be very difficult to get good search engine rankings for popular terms.

In those circumstances it’s best to do some more research and identify keywords that are not as popular but still have a good number of monthly searches. Check out the level of competition as well. You can do that by looking at the number of results returned when you search for the keyword.

Your ideal scenario is to find terms that have enough monthly searches but not too much competition. You will then stand a much better chance of getting a good search engine ranking than you would by choosing the most popular keywords. And because of that you will get more traffic to your website.

So let me illustrate this with an example. Let’s say you’re in the “Indian food” niche market. If you put the term “Indian food” in the Google keyword tool you’ll see that there are 450,000 monthly searches and 23,600,000 competing sites. That’s a lot of searches but also a lot of competition! However, if you enter “Indian cookery recipes” you get 9,900 monthly searches and 272,000 competing sites.

So it pays to do your research and to identify keywords that have sufficient numbers of searches but not as much competition as the top searched terms. The less competition the better. What you then need to do is to use the keywords you’ve identified for your articles, blog posts, videos etc so that you can drive traffic to your website. Traffic is essential if you want to have a successful online business.