One of the most often asked questions we have is, "How many keywords should I have?" The answer to that question really depends on what type of SEO program you are working on. If you are working on your organic or natural search engine rankings, then the answer is ideally about 2 keywords per page of your site. If you are working on Pay-Per-Click programs (PPC) then the answer really depends on how many services or products you have. I cannot think of a single company that should have less than 100 keywords. And most should have thousands, and that is even if you just offer a few services.
The reason for these high numbers is that you really want to focus in on the long-tail keywords. So what are those? Long-tail keywords are simply a more specific set of words to identify the search. For instance, if someone is looking for a Pet Store, a generic keyword would be "Pet Stores". But most people realize they are not going to find a local pet store using such a generic keyword, so they will probably use a more specific keyword, such as "Pet Store Phoenix, AZ." And more and more people are adding in the exact item they are searching for. For instance, someone might search for "Pro Plan dog food Phoenix, AZ". As you can see, it would be very nice if you came up on the top of the rankings when someone searched for that 'long-tail' keyword.
There is also another reason to make sure people can find you on the long-tail keywords. Conversion rates are MUCH higher on long-tail keywords than they are on the more generic keywords. This probably has to do with the fact that if they find you using a keyword like "attorney accident victim grand rapids mi" then you DO offer exactly what they are looking for, in the area they are looking to buy in.
So if you offer products for sale, and you are doing a Pay-Per-Click campaign, just to give you an idea on the keywords you can use on just ONE product, take a look at these suggestions for the product called "Acer AL2216WBD 22" Widescreen LCD Monitor". We are assuming that this vendor sells online, so their market is a national one:
- Acer 22" Widescreen Monitor
- AL2216WBD
- AL2216
- Then, for each of the three keywords above, add EVERY city name to the end of it. Examples are: "AL2216WBD San Diego" and "AL2216WBD San Francisco" and "AL2216WBD Grand Rapids" ETC. There are thousands of city names, county names, nicknames.
What you will want to do is to obtain a list of all zip codes, all city names, all county names and append each one to the end of each of your primary keywords. As you can see, for each product you could have thousands of keywords. If you sell thousands of products, you would (and should) be set up with over a million keywords in a PPC campaign.
How you manage all those keywords is subject for additional posts to this blog. We look forward to sharing more information with you.
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