When you optimize your website to rank high in Google search results, it’s important to narrow down specific keywords to target. Though you might want to, you can’t rank high for everything, so the first step in any SEO activity is to decide what keywords are most relevant to your website or business.
Once you’ve decided on your target keywords, you’re faced with the prospect of investing time, energy and money in optimizing your website to rank well for them. But what if there was another step that allowed you to take the keywords for a test drive before investing your resources? There is, and I’m happy to share it with you.
Pretend You Want to Improve Your Dog Kennel Website’s SEO
Let’s say you operate a dog kennel in Tucson, Arizona, and you’ve decided to target the following keywords: dog kennel Tucson, dog hotel Tucson, Tucson dog sitter, dog boarding Tucson and dog resort Tucson.
The Typical SEO Approach to Targeting Keywords
The next step, in most SEO programs, is to begin using these keywords throughout your website content, page titles, links, and so on. Of course, getting other websites to link to yours using these terms is also quite helpful to establish credibility.
But that takes a lot of time and work, and you’re not completely sure just how much of either it will take to rank for the keywords you’ve chosen, nor do you know how much actual business will result when you achieve your goal.
How can you save yourself the time and energy and find out right away how your business will benefit from ranking well for your selected keywords? The answer is Google Adwords.
What is Google Adwords?
Google Adwords is a service provided by Google that allows you to pay for clicks to your website. You create a Google Adwords account, specify the keywords you want to target, and put some money in the pot. Easy as pie, your website suddenly appears at the top when people perform a Google search looking for a doggy kennel in Tucson.
While dropping $100 in your Google Adwords account is probably enough to get you started, often you can actually acquire a free $100 advertising credit from Google or from your hosting provider, which allows you to do this without any out of pocket expense.
How You Can Use Google Adwords to Test Out Your Keywords
We’re talking about SEO here — free, organic search results. Why mention Google Adwords? Simple. Google Adwords allows you to instantly “rank” for the keywords you’ve chosen. Although you’re paying for the clicks at this point, you’ll be able to see exactly what type of response your website gets from people searching the keywords you’ve chosen to target.
This provides you with an immediate opportunity to see if these keywords bring you quality traffic to your site, and whether or not they’ll result in a worthwhile increase in business. If the answer is yes, viola, you now know that you’ve found the right keywords.
You can now begin the process of implementing them in your actual website, and writing quality content that includes them, or spend more time testing out other keywords.
You Might Just Like Google Adwords
Although this is a method to assess the true value of specific keywords before you take the time to incorporate them in your website SEO strategy, you might also find that Google Adwords is simply enough.
SEO takes time and a lot of work if you want to do it the right way, and both time and work cost you money, whether directly or as a result of bypassed opportunities. There’s a chance you might decide to just run the ads and your business and save the entire SEO strategy for another day.
Zachary Coyne is a freelance website designer and developer in Tucson, Arizona. Zach has been designing, developing, fixing and updating websites for the better part of a decade. He enjoys helping people learn how to fix and update their websites, and offers one on one 