Please help with SEO keyword research

[jasonlewisdiiigy]

Hi Moz community,

I would like to request your collective wisdom. I'm new to SEO and putting together an SEO research and strategy document for the employment service I work for.

Have solid skills in Google Adwords and have ran a campaign over the last two years with excellent results. But this SEO thing is a whole new world! That's why who better to turn to than the leading community for SEO professionals? Any support, advice, tips would be most welcomed appreciated.

It's an employment service and I've got a list of keywords. For example, here are some of the action words I thought could be useful:

<colgroup><col width="215"> <col width="91"> <col width="65"></colgroup>

[find staff]	0.79	73
[find employees]	0.97	73
[looking for staff]	0.94	58
[looking for staff]	0.94	58
[staff wanted]	0.62	58
[looking for employees]	0.94	46
[look for work]	0.77	36
[looking for workers]	0.93	36
[find workers]	0.91	36
[employee search]	0.72	28
[staff search]	0.37	28
[find an employee]	0.79	22
[search for employees]	0.71	12
[find a worker]	0.66	12
[how to find employees]	0.71	12

My questions:

Where to from here? If this was a Google Adwords campaign I would place the words in, create ad copy and test response. But with SEO, are these words useful?

Can you target all of these words with SEO - or am I better finding words with higher volume?

How many words should I be looking to target? For example, am I only trying to find the 5 or 10 highest volume words, or is it important to target lots of words with SEO?

Is it just one set of keywords per page, or can I target all the above keywords on one page?

I'm a bit lost. Thanks in advance for your consideration.

[SimonCullum]

Hi Jason

A good place to start is by reading/studying 'The Beginners Guide to SEO' which can be found here on Moz  http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

From your list of keywords, it looks like your target audience is Employers who are looking for new Employees ?  This list of keywords looks like it has the Adwords competition index and local monthly searches ?

If so, those are very targeted keywords with little search volume, though likely to convert well.

I'd suggest considering some more generic search terms also, Employers do search on terms such as 'recruitment' and 'recruitment agency', so worth revisiting your list of keywords to incorporate some higher volume terms as well.

That's not to say it's better to target those before the more targeted & longtail, can be easier to rank for those before trying the more generic, which can be supported by the longtail.

As for how many words, as many or as little really, depends on what your website has to offer and who your target audience are. A combination of high volume generics and lower volume longtail could be the way to go, depends on your website's and businesses' objectives.

Each page within your site would ideally be based around one main topic, so one main keyword, supported by one, two or three secondary keywords. Each page should serve a specific purpose and add value based around that purpose.

It can be useful to try keywords that you're unsure about via Paid search to get a feel for volumes, CTRs and conversions.

Hopefully some things to consider there.

Regards

Simon

[philipbuuck]

Those keywords you listed look like long tail keywords - none of them even get 100 searches a month in Google's estimates.

I would personally target long tails like this with blog posts.  I don't know what kind of website you're working on, but if it has been around for awhile and has some domain authority, having some solid articles on how your company helps businesses [find employees] for companies that are [looking for staff] members that are reliable and worth their effort, it would probably draw in some of these long tails on its own.

With such long tails, you could probably target several of them with one article.  A series of articles that describe (in generalities) your company's hiring methods would probably allow you space to get lots of these in the text.

[jasonlewisdiiigy]

Hi Philip,

Thank you for sharing your expertise! Ok, so create blog posts with the long tailed words as a way to bring in some of these keywords. I'm also in the process of setting up a blog and will start to plan for this method. Awesome! Thank you.

[jasonlewisdiiigy]

Hi Simon,

Thank you for sharing. Read through the beginners guide and this is starting to become clearer! Yes that's correct, the target audience is employers looking for employees. I want them to come to the website and register their staff needs with an online form (free because we're a non profit).

Thank you for the advice to look for more generic keywords with higher volumes. I'll continue searching.

Targeting keywords, ok, so it's a good approach to target a combination of generic and long-tail:

-One topic per page with one main keyword. Also supported with secondary keywords (2-3).

I'll continue searching within these guidelines.

Thanks again.

Jason