Time and time again, I hear about website marketers shooting blind with keywords. Or, more specifically, they wing it with keyword selection.

Picking keywords that sound good and seem relevant is only part of the game. You can aspire to hit the mark along those lines. But what if you rank #31 at the end of the day? What good is that? So what if you chose relevant words?

I’ve long said that you need to know what your website brings to the table? Is it worthy? Does it rank for anything? Are you doing an overhaul? Will the new design hurt or help rankings? Who is creating the new content? Will it reinforce some themes so the website establishes or builds on its authority?

And that’s just the start.

Keep the following in mind while you earnestly think about the choose your keywords:

Keyword selection is a tricky business.

I focus on relevancy and possibly searcher intent words like “firm” or “buy” or “service.”

I suggest thinking about these factors and more…

• Whether you already targeted a keyword phrase for another page
• Domain age
• Domain name (is the keyword in the domain name)
• Domain authority score
• Existing relevant content
• Plans for new content
• Page content header length
• Number of website pages
• Current rankings
• Competition (what they have going for them from an SEO perspective)
• Whether anyone bids on the keyword phrase (paid search is an indicator of its value)
• Nature of the top 10 search results (is the industry well represented)
• Monthly search volume (i.e. Google public data)
• Organic landing page performance in website analytics (i.e. sessions)