Pareto Principle and Keyword Research

I have read several posts about SEO being easy and in some cases these people are right. If all you are doing is adding lightly researched keywords into title tags and sprinkling keywords into copy, SEO is not rocket science. Things are harder when you you start to think about what keywords are truly optimal for a page? What 65 title tag characters and copy will produce optimal results? Should you use Geo-targeted, tail terms, informational or brand-name keywords? No keyword tool is just going to lay all of this out for you and it does matter. Yes, Google will rank your site without having to do extensive keyword research, but it will rank it higher if you do.

The Pareto Principle and Keyword Research:

A real challenge with keyword research is finding out which of the 20 percent of your keywords are producing 80 percent of your leads / sales? If you know this you are ahead of the game and can skew your keywords to target this 20 percent. Looking at your analytics only tells part of the story. Your analytics will only tell which keywords currently being targeted are best. It tells you nothing of the keyword combinations you don’t know about.

Finding Your 20 Percent:

PPC is probably the best way to find the money keywords in a given vertical. Finding the sweet spots means changing things and monitoring the results. This isn't always a good tactic for your SEO campaign. Making a lot of changes to a given page can be risky and could do more harm than good.

Once you see that a given keyword is profitable from a PPC standpoint you can aggressively go after that keyword with your SEO campaign.