Any SEO campaign is going to be targeted against one or more keywords and key phrases.
The choice of keywords and phrases that you use will determine the ease with which you can rise to the top of the search engine results pages and also how much traffic and the quality of the traffic you will receive.
A common SEO snake oil salesman technique is to guarantee first page positions however it turns out that is the first page for an esoteric phrase that is loosely related to your business. That phrase might literally have no searches per month so no one is trying to optimise for it. That means that you can easily get to the first page – well done – but you are not going to see any benefit for that.
Another common pitfall which whilst well intentioned is going to lead to a lack of any business benefit is to pick a broad term that is highly competitive and for which you are going to really struggle to actually get anywhere close to even the first ten pages. For example if this blog was going for the key word SEO then we would have a really hard time getting to the top. Instead we are targetting the phrase “Magento SEO” and hope that by simply adding in that extra focus, we are improving our chances of getting onto the first page.
We are no where near yet but time will tell.
To research your keywords there are a few tools you can use, some free and some paid for. I generally start off with the free Google tools when brainstorming, for example Google Trends is great for getting a quick visual indication of what is happening in a few key phrases around Magento and SEO.
You can see that the single phrases Magento and SEO are getting the most traffic, however getting to the first page for a single word such as SEO when you are a little blog like this one is going to be really hard.
Instead we are targetting something much lower traffic but with the idea that people who find us will be looking for exactly what we provide and our chances of getting in front of those people are all the greater by narrowing our focus down to this specific niche phrase.
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