Online marketers know very well that keywords help in bettering search rankings but to achieve the business goals by earning revenue, you must ensure that ranks and keywords work together. After all, the purpose of SEO is to improve the business results, and the inability to do it would be a waste of your efforts. The trick lies in choosing appropriate keywords that drive more quality traffic to websites and increases conversions that pave the way for earning revenue. The target must be to rank well for those keywords only and not other keywords. In general, the keywords must closely relate to your business, but some specific keywords are more potent in generating leads and conversions that move the needle and results in revenue flowing in. Making these selected keywords in rank well should be your goal instead of pursuing other sundry keywords.

Optimize for keywords

To make certain keywords work more effectively for your SEO cause and business betterment by earning high ranks in search results, it is extremely important to optimize these correctly. Any top SEO expert will tell you to focus on the specifics instead of dabbling in too many keywords and to chart your course of action first create a visual guide like some infographic that outlines your goals of on-page SEO and keyword targeting. Be rational in your approach during optimization to avoid the pitfall of over optimization that can harm the SEO prospects. Begin the process of optimization by knowing your current ranking as it helps to measure progress. Use a tracking tool to monitor progress easily without spending too much time.

Focus on keyword variations

Selecting the right keywords can be quite challenging because the high performing keywords that promise the best returns are so much competitive that it could be out of your reach due to prohibitively high cost. Usually, the leading SEO players who are bigger companies with enough financial strength dominate all such keywords that make it almost impossible for others to lay their hands on it. A more pragmatic approach in finding keywords that can work well for you by keeping away from the lure of creamy layer is to find out related keywords that are closest to the target. This helps to avoid excessive competition and access keywords that are effective in setting the stage for giving a fight to the bigger players.

Staying flexible in choosing keywords will protect you from the heat of competition while allowing you to progress with the campaign in your own way that generates results.  Since the keywords have a close relation to the targeted ones, it will help you to make good progress.

Set real expectations

Once you identify the related keywords that have enough potential to strengthen your campaign, you become aware of the ground reality that helps in setting the right expectations. But you must realize the power of keywords by judging it from various angles to assess its potential in driving traffic by taking into account the competition it faces.  Although you might be quite happy with your assessment about the potential of keywords, you must have the courage to fight competition to move forward in the right direction.

What are your competitors doing?

Look closely at your competitors to understand which keywords worked well for them and the elements that helped to earn high ranks in search results. By scrutinizing the competitor’s website, try to gauge its authority and figure out if any particular web page or domain has helped it to push the keyword ahead. Evaluate how good the quality of content is as compared to yours and see if there is any room for improvement. Once you complete the exercise, you should be in a position to gather enough idea about which alternate keywords could do well for you. This should help to identify some realistic and effective keywords that face less competition and most useful for creating an alternate plan that you can use in case your targeted keywords do not live up to your expectations.

Fall back on long tail keywords

You must be flexible in dealing with keywords. If your preferred keywords seem to have hit a dead end, then quickly change your tact and fall upon long tail keywords.  Long tail keywords usually appear during keyword research, and now it is time to make use of it. Identify the long tail keywords that can drive good traffic but face low competition. By using your skills in page optimization, you should be able to make good progress without feeling stressed. The secret of success is to extract as much juice as possible from moderately performing keywords instead of trying to reach out for the coveted ones that could always remain out of your reach.

Although keywords are prime movers, you must work equally hard to create an impressive backlink profile, which is one of the key elements of any successful SEO campaign.