When it comes to how to choose the right keywords there are alot of factors behind choosing your keywords, and this is just covering the one basic factor of “demand vs competition”.

Googling the competition is a big part of starting any SEO plan for any field. When you are an expert SEO,googling others using that term is a day to day thing. You can get insight and ideas from the “other guys” as well as identify who has work you respect and who is a pretender.

Recently Googling Miami SEO, to see who and what is top page for this term I cam across one company explaining their approach and pitching to cutomers why to choose their “unique” technique. I don’t put much stock into a company that spends too much time ranking itself for SEO work, since its the client that matters.

Even a fat chef can make bad food, since he could have gotten fat on twinkies and McDonalds.

Some content from another guys SEO website:

Step 1: Identify demand. Pretend for a moment that you own a law firm and you have been presented with the opportunity to be #1 in Google for one keyword. Your 2 options are lawyer and attorney. Which one would you choose?
Identifying which keywords are best for your business can be a daunting task. How do you identify the keywords with the highest demand? How many keywords should you start with? Are there additional keywords that you didn’t identify?
The good news is that you don’t have to guess. Our SEO Experts have years of experience using Google provided tools to identify demand in your industry and local area.

Now when a website says experience and “experts” to identify your keywords and their demand, what that means is they goto:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

…and type the words “Miami Lawyer” and press submit.
It then lists all relevent keywords and the number of monthly searches for that.

On “other guy’s” website they show a nice line graph comparing the number the word lawyer and attorney, pointing out one gets twice as many searches per month. Something every person could see from the link above and typing two words.

So far we havn’t seen much more expertise than reading a 30 second blog post can provide.

Now, what could an expert SEO do with this really?

Well scanning the list, you will get “personal injury” is the most sought after variable in the keyword group. If you are not this type of lawyer, then we want to make sure you are not competing with them for page #1.

With this type of keyword, the number of searches is not relevent when compared to the number of competitors that could take the perfect surfer from you. We will be going 3 or 4 words long for sure on the keyword of choice for your business. Using lawyer or attorney won;t matter if we can’t get the niche surfers you need to see real conversion.

If I am a divorce lawyer, I do not want to target Miami Lawyer nor Miami Attorney. I should be comparing Miami Divorce Lawyer or attorney instead.

Now this is still pretty common sense, as much SEO is.

Here is where we can start using a trained eye. Take those 3 word combinations and goto the actual results and stop relying on tools.
Who is listed top 20 for each one? How many of those sites are insurrmountable?

Also, with local business being a big part of this and perhaps your field, lets look four words deep and get our town or county in the search.
How many people are searching Doral Divorce laywer / attorney. Do we still have enough interested surfers, and have we gone specific enough to eliminate alot of the big sites that pose a problem to work past?

It’s not just how many searches, but a ratio of searchs vs competition. Google tools tell you high/medium/low competition on each, and you can see the total results returned, but must also get a trained eye on the top 20 and see which are internet titans that won’t be easily moved.

If you have seen searches in the “news”, “gambling”, “nfl football blog” or even this lawyer search before you know there are some big time sites that you will have to work around with niche keyword targetting.

It’s not about what EVERYONE is searching for, its about what “enough” people are searching for that you can corner the market on.

When you read articles about marketing and hear people using the word “niche” over and over again, this is the experienced online marketers way of saying “some keywords just arn’t meant to be targetted”. Picking the ones that are will have you selling sooner and then we can expand to bigger audiences when we get to the initial goal.