You must do a keyword analysis in order to make sure you are choosing the right keywords for your website. A lot of companies make the mistake of creating their website using keywords they assume people would use to find their website. There is sometimes a difference in the keywords you would use in searching for your website and what your potential customers would use in searching for your website.

Beginning keyword analysis

You must first write down the obvious keywords. For this article, let’s pretend we are writing for a photographer who does only pets, a pet photographer. The obvious keywords would be pet photography, pet photographer, photographer, Vancouver photographer, Vancouver pet photography.
Now let’s look at some of the non obvious ones. Dog photographer, cat photographer etc… There are a few other such as: pet photos, pet pictures, animal photography, animal photos, animal pictures, animal pics, pet pics, pet pix, pet people, petpeople, dog grooming, dog pictures, cat pictures, bird pictures, dog photos, dog images, animal images, pet suites, dog photography, puppy photos, location photography and animal art.

Now that you have created this great list of possible keywords, I am sure you are asking, now what? We are going to see which keywords are searched for most often and which keywords have less competition. In Google “pet photography” came back with 24,900,000 results. This is a lot of results. The more results, the more competition, the harder you have to work to get a good placement.

Back to the basics.

Since we are a pet photographer and we are located in Vancouver, BC, Canada, we might need a results a little closer to home. I can only assume that people in Vancouver looking for a pet photographer would look for one in Vancouver. Thus, using the term Vancouver Pet Photography. The term Vancouver pet photography in Google, returned 1,870,000 results, which makes Vancouver Pet photography a better keyword with less competition. Now let’s look at: Vancouver pet photographer this keyword yielded 3,360,000 which is 3 x times more that the last keyword we analyzed. I am sure this gives you an idea of how we make sure we have al list of all the keywords that a potential client might use to find your website.

Now that you have gone through every keyword and got to see how much competition there is for that keyword it gives you a better idea on which keywords to use. Now a quick tip. Optimize each page with only one or two keywords. Do this to your entire website and make sure you have a really good navigation system on your website so, that if your potential client searches for dog photos and ended up entering your website at 5 pages in, he is still able to find what he is looking for because you have a great navigation system or sitemap that will lead him to the right page. Also, for more competitive keywords you would have to create more pages for that one keyword.