Instead try “long-tail marketing where you aim to be on the first page of the results for a string of less popular keywords. How do you select these keywords? There are a lot of packages out there that purport to generate keywords for your website, such as Hittail and Web-Ceo. However, I have found that the best way to find long tail keywords is using “Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free website metric analyser (the best out there in my opinion), which tells you where your traffic is coming from, which pages on your website are the most popular and which keywords sent people to your website.

Go to the list of keywords, and note them down on a jotter. You will find that the majority are variations on a theme. Say your website is all about the property market, the search terms could be property foreclosures Jacksonville, property forclosures Jacksonville Florida, etc. List all the search terms even though there may be several hundred of them. The beauty of using Analytics is that these are keywords that real people typed into the search engine and found your website. You’ll notice that several of the really popular keywords that you thought you’d see just arn’t there.

Then type them into Google to see which results page your website shows up on and note this down next to the search term. Then enter each term into “Google Insights for Search, to see whether they are popular. Some will generate a graph, others simply arn’t popular enough to have enough data for Insights to display. Note which keywords are popular.

Now you have a list of keywords, you can see where you rank on Google for each, and you can see which terms are popular enough to generate a graph on Google Insights. You then need to choose a set of keywords to concentrate your efforts on. Going back to our example, “property” and “property foreclosures” are incredibly popular keywords, and they probably didn’t even feature on your Analytics results because your website is listed at number 120 or something for it. Concentrate on the keywords that did feature in your Analytics results that also show on Google Insights as popular. Your goal now is to ensure that your website features on the first search results page for these keywords.

How do you do this? Optimise your website to include these keywords. See this article which advises “how to set up your website to get traffic.