A lot of companies underestimate the importance of keyword research as part of their SEO strategy. For Yorkshire small businesses it is a vital way of being more readily and easily found by the search engines. However you must choose the right keywords for your SEO campaign, so if you’re Yorkshire based and your customers are local, then it makes sense to target regional keyphrases.

Choosing local keyphrases has a couple of advantages. Firstly the competition for that phrase is likely to be less, making it easier to rank for and secondly the people typing in that phrase will be much more targeted, therefore more likely to be interested in what you have to offer.

You now have to identify which keywords are relevant to your niche, then dig deeper to find the ones that have good monthly searches, but low competition. Usually what are called long tailed keyphrases are the best ones to try and rank for. These are made up from 3 to 5 words that best describe your niche.

For instance if your business is SEO, that keyword on it’s own would be very hard to rank for as the amount of searches would be massive and the same with the competition, so to get onto page 1 in the natural listings would take months and a load of backlinking work. Alternatively if you started a Pay Per Click campaign to achieve faster results, the cost per click would be very expensive for a term like that.

Therefore, instead you could try “SEO in Yorkshire” or “SEO for Yorkshire small businesses” as these terms still get searched for, but have much lower competition, meaning your chances of a top 5 placing on page 1 in the natural listings would be much greater.

You can invest in software to help you with keyword research or if your budget is tight you can use a free service like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool which is a great way of identifying niche phrases within your market.

Now that you have your keywords, you can generate backlinks to your site that will help you rank for that keyphrase. If this process is done correctly and regularly it should attract free traffic to your site for a sustained period of time, meaning you don’t have the expense of Google Ad campaigns to deal with.

If you’re not confident about tackling the process, then here at SEO Web Design Yorkshire we can do it all for you, including finding the keywords, then providing the backlinks that will push your site onto the first page.