What Are Keywords?

Keywords vs. Good Keywords

What’s the difference between a keyword and a good keyword? If you don’t know, you’re not getting the most out of your content creation plan or your search engine optimization.

You want to select keywords for which people are actually searching.

It doesn’t do you much good to own the number one slot at Google for “peripheral monkey excitement dogma shortstop” because no one in his or right mind is ever going to type that little query into Google.

At the same time, you don’t want to target keywords that are so hyper-competitive that you’ll never, ever make a decent mark in the search engine results.

If fifteen Fortune 500 companies are going after your keyword like maniacs, it’s going to be hard to build a lot of traffic.

So, we know that finding good keywords is a balancing act between competition and search volume. That’s really only the first part of finding the right keywords to target, though.

There’s another keyword component to the process that people too often overlook.

They’re so thrilled to find that high-volume/low-competition term that they don’t subject the keywords themselves to another level of scrutiny.

We’re talking about assessing whether or not the probable traffic associated with a given keyword has a real chance of producing results.

Let’s say you have a business website that’s promoting an information product designed to teach people how to customize widgets. You do your keyword research and you come up with two different terms.

“How to customize black widgets” gets a hundred searches every day and has 1,000 competing sites.

“Avoid widget customization” gets seven hundred searches on a daily basis and has only 300 competing sites.

Which keyword are you going after?

Hey, you can probably seize the top slot at Google for the second term. You’ll probably end up with a lot of traffic as a result, too.

The first term won’t get you the same kind of visitor count and it will require more effort to rank toward the top of the heap.

Nonetheless, you should be going with that first option if you’re forced to choose between the two. Why? “Avoid widget customization” isn’t going to bring you people who want to spend money to learn how to customize widgets.

It’s going to bring you a slew of people with no interest whatsoever in the product. The odds of turning those people into buyers is slim to none.

The “how to customize black widgets” crowd, on the other hand, will contain people who want to learn how to customize widgets. They’ll be the folks who are willing to plunk down a few bucks in order to get the scoop on how to do it. They’re potential buyers.

Good keywords bring people to your website.

Search volume and competition are important filters when you’re considering keywords, but they’re not everything. The actual meaning of the terms and the traffic that’s likely to accompany searches containing them can be just, if not more, important.