SEO Tips: Pick a Practical Goal with Your Keywords

Perhaps the most important part of the process of doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on your website is selecting the keywords or phrases that you're targeting in the first place. Almost every decision you make after that point will be dictated by those keywords.

It's human nature to want to cast as wide of a net as we can, hoping that we happen to catch lots of what we're looking for, along with everything else. However, that isn't always practical, and the person who spent their time using the proper bait, to target exactly what they were looking for, probably got simmilar results with less of an investment. There are exceptions, but chances are you're looking for clients, not page hits.

For Example: Every Lawyer would love to rank #1 for the Google search "lawyers." No doubt that's a coveted position, and it would be silly to pretend it's not. However, while that list of search results is probably going to be very tough to crack, anything less than that is far from defeat. If your company only handles maritime law in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, then chances are a vast majority of people searching "lawyers" aren't a match for your services anyway. A search phrase along the lines of "Maritime Law Upper Peninsula MI" is obviously going to be searched several orders of magnitude less than "lawyers", but it's highly likely that anyone that does search that is looking for your company.