Ongoing keyword evaluation

- Ongoing keyword evaluation is critical to the long-term success of your SEO efforts, and it's really the last step of the keyword research cycle. With all of the great keyword data that we can look at, the one data point that we can't find out about in advance is how they'll actually perform for us. Once we start ranking for the keywords that we've targeted and we start to get traffic coming to our pages as a result of those rankings, we'll need to see if those keywords are actually driving conversion actions and helping us achieve business objectives. Remember that used Toyota Camry keyword that we thought would be so perfect for us? Well, it might turn out that everyone typing in that keyword is looking for a place to take their car to get fixed for free as a result of a product recall. All of our research told us that this would be a great keyword, but it might turn out in the end that it's not actually driving any car sales. The point is we'll need to be able to adapt. You'll find some keywords just aren't producing results for you. So don't be afraid to swap in new keywords in place of those that aren't working, and you'll only know this once you've already gotten traffic coming to your website from those keywords. One quick way to do some testing is through paid search. Using platforms like Google Ads or Bing Ads, you can buy the keywords that you want to evaluate for a short period of time and then collect the data that will help you understand whether or not these keywords are going to provide business value for you. While paid search clicks do tend to behave a little differently than clicks on organic search results, this can be a good proxy and potentially save you months of work and lost opportunity. Webmaster tools can also help you out here. We all want to know what terms our customers and prospects are using to discover all of our content, and tools like Search Analytics and Google Search Console can tell us just that. You can use these performance reports to look up your landing pages and the queries that are being used to display the page in search results, and you can identify which queries are driving clicks and impressions, which average positions they may hold, as well as how often they're getting clicked on, and don't forget that SEO isn't just a one-time set it and forget it project. It's a continuous process that has to be maintained over the long-term. This industry is constantly changing, and the way people use search engines is evolving, too. The keyword research that you did a year ago might not be valid anymore, so make sure that you're revisiting this exploration a few times over the course of a year to find new opportunities that may have come up. By staying abreast of changes with fresh research and focusing on how your target keywords contribute to your website's organic traffic and business objectives, you'll be developing a better understanding of your visitors, their search patterns, and how you can serve them better, both today and for years to come.