What makes a keyword good?

[noortomlinson]

Having taken a day-long course not long ago, I'm new to SEO and I'm struggling to decide which keywords to target. I work in a really niche area: we make booking engines that allow travel agencies to sell flights, hotels, cars and other travel services online.

I know there are various tools on the web (and on Moz) which give you the average monthly searches and competition for each term but I still don't understand how to decide which ones to target.

For example, the term 'travel systems' gets a high amount of search and the competition for it is high. However, Google brings back results about prams and buggies so I think I should avoid this one.

Another is 'travel solutions' which gets a high amount of search and is low on competition. Google brings back results about travel agencies. This is more our area but our target audience is travel agencies so I'm not really sure I'd be attracting the right traffic?

I'd be really grateful for any advice that you can give me.

[I.AM.Strategist]

Hello,

Obviously you're looking for a combination of volume, relevance and difficulty. Low volume keywords which are difficult to rank for are less attractive than high volume keywords which have a low difficulty.

That said, those high volume keywords need to be as relevant as possible. I would always suggest that your content and SEO focus should be around user intent rather than specific words.

If you start with a list of what your customer's user intent is, then add in what problems your product solves, you will very quickly have written your keyword list - some of those keywords may be long tail but I don't think it matters all that much.

Example:

"software for travel agencies"
"programs that allow travel agencies to sell bookings online"
"Best travel agency software"
"travel agency online booking software"
"software for online tour operators"

etc

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

Hi There,

It's great that you're niche.  This means that you don' really need to worry much about difficulty.  I get frustrated with people talking all the time about 'difficulty'.  It's self-defeating.  You should go out there and write content that's so good it beats all the competition no matter how 'competitive' or 'difficult' the keyword.  If anyone in my team said they were going to be dissuaded from doing something because it was 'too difficult' I'd send them to another team

So look at your competitors but don't blindly follow them.  Speak to your customers, stakeholders and suppliers to discover the words they use.  Are there phones that you can listen in to at your business?  I listen to call recordings to get a feel for what language patients are using.

And at the end of the day don't worry too much about semantics.  Google is very good now at figuring out what you are talking about so I would be tempted to just do some free thinking and try to write the most comprehensively, the most brilliantly and with the most detail about these products and your customers will find you.

If they are technical customer, write technically.  Don't 'dumb it down'.  Use the big complex words and include an FAQ section to pick up questions and long tail keywords (but beware of keyword stuffing)

Once you have written some content then you'll be able to optimise and analyse and test and get a feel for what is right and what people are searching for and reading about.  The competitor research is just the start and in a really niche place you often just need to get things down and out there in the world and see how they perform.

Once you get cracking you'll soon become an absolute specialist and if you keep your eyes on the data you should be able to dominate your niche.  Tight niches are great.  You're lucky because broad or very high volume keywords can have problems all of their own.