One might say there is a bit of an art and science to selecting the right keywords for a website. From this Columbus website design firm's perspective, these are the things we look for:

• you want once that are searched a lot, but also ones with “low” competition,
• it’s better to have a search term with a lower number of searches if there’s also less competition,
• you want ones that are easily incorporated into blog posts, and
• you want to focus on only a handful of phrases to work into your content, say 3 or 4 keyword phrases.

Why use only 3 or 4 phrases?

Well, if you use 10 or 15 keyword phrases regularly, you’d be spreading yourself (and your website) too thin for search terms you want Google (and other search engines) to associate with your website.

Even though we're Columbus web design folks, we're currently working on a website, and SEO, for a Gastroenterology practice in Brooklyn, NY.  So the information below relates to what we did for them.

The recommendation was for them to have a good combination of 3 or 4 search terms that they'd always use on their website and in your blogs. When you have certain phrases in your website often enough (but not overkill) search engines will start to associate those particular keywords with your site.

That way, when someone in Brooklyn searches for those terms, and they’re using the exact same search terms people are searching for, Google makes that connection.

Like any marketing, it's an ongoing effort

The more you update your website, the more it gets indexed by search engines. And the more you use specific keywords, the more search engines see your site as being relevant when those search terms are keyed into a search engine.

Those pesky competitors

The other consideration is your competition: how well are they using the same search terms?

In the case of the Brooklyn Gastroenterologists, we checked out what their top three competitors were doing.

Doctor A had a really nice, new site, but they weren't using keyword search terms very well, nor were they doing blog posts, so in essence, there was no SEO in Doctor A's website.

Doctor B’s truly ugly site didn’t have a blog, so they don’t update their site. The other thing working against Doctor B was, they’re not using keywords on their site. So essentially, there’s no “SEO” (search     engine optimization) on Doctor B's website.

Doctor C does have a News (blog) section, but they've only add content to that section twice in 2013 and 3 times in 2014. That's the equivalent of not doing any SEO or blogging.

Adding content that infrequently doesn’t do much for keeping their website relevant to search engines. But Doctor C was using some keywords in their blogs. They were using “Brooklyn Gastroenterologists” and “Best Gastroenterologists in Brooklyn”.

The problem is, according to Google's Keyword Tool, the phrase “Best Gastroenterologists in Brooklyn” has had zero searches done for it in the past 30 days. So they were probably be guessing at the search terms to use, which is always a bad idea!

So if the doctors we're working with blogged once a month, they'd be well ahead of those other doctors.

Never, ever, guess at your search terms

This is something we've talked about often: guessing at your keywords. Doing that pretty much assures you'll guess wrong, and if you use the wrong keywords in your website, it's the same as not doing any SEO on your website.

Google's Keyword Tool is free, and tells you exactly how many searches are done for any given keyword in the past 30 days.

To read a story of how guessing at keywords is a recipe for doing things wrong, check out our recent blog post about the subject.

We hope you found this information helpful.

If you want to talk about how we might be able to help you, please drop us an email.