Keyword SEO - Optimize For Higher Traffic Or Lower Competition

Higher Traffic? Lower Competition? What's the difference? Of the two--traffic or competition--which should be your priority? What if there was a way to optimize for both? So, how do you judge the marketplace in which you want your ads to appear? Here's a clue.

Traffic Optimization Data

According to the mathematicians at Market Samurai, creators of a multi-functional, keyword analysis software, there are some interesting data to be discovered when observing the sites ranked on the Google search engine results page (SERP). Without getting hip-deep into the math like they did, suffice it to say that the top twenty Google positions for the most searched keywords have the possibility of being ranked by up to 46 different keywords that could potentially trigger the appearance of an ad.

This is "SEO slop-over" that comes from keywords that are closely related to the ones you've optimized for. In other words, you might optimize your site for a single keyword, but you'll still rank well on Google for a lot more of them. This is particularly true when dealing with the results of broad match keywords, since you'll see traffic from the specific keyword plus all of the variations of the other combinations of the keyword phrases you use. This is a little known serendipity when using the broad match option in search engines.

And, this is good! Traffic to your website using the Broad Match option is great--unless they're all "tire kickers." A massive influx of non-buyers will result in substandard amounts of profit.

SEO Competition

During keyword analysis, it's better to find keywords that have the fewest number of competitors. This is logical since the fewer competitors there are for a keyword, the fewer sites that need to be outranked in the Google results page. And, since lower competition allows us to rank higher faster, we realize increased profits sooner. So, when analyzing the amount of competition, we should use figures based upon the Phrase Match keyword option since we'll obtain results that are more precisely related to our optimized keywords. We won't see the "superfluous variations" as we would with Broad Match option, mentioned previously. This will result in a more accurate reflection of the competition for a particular keyword. Phrase Match gets rid of a lot of irrelevant sites that might skew our numbers to make it appear as if it's harder to get a higher ranking for a given keyword than it actually is.

OK, so What?

Again, the Market Samurai software calculates a ratio which sets an all important threshold, outside of which, market analysis is less effective. When you compare the Phrase-versus-Broad match options for a given keyword there is a percentage that optimizes the selection process to ensure the maximum effectiveness of your keywords for niche and sub-niche exploitation. This optimal ratio is found during the use of the Market Samurai software.

KEYWORD RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS

For example, if you used the keyword phrase "driving a cobra" with the broad match option, you might get search results about herding snakes or road testing a high performance sport car (and possibly even results addressing a text messaging acronym). Broad match can increase your amounts of traffic over the other keyword options, like exact- and phrase-match options.