SEO done right should make you money, but that’s not likely to  happen when the hard up-front work of SEO keyword research isn’t done well. Not doing your keyword research adequately is one of the worst SEO mistakes you can make, because that is where you make your money. Don’t skimp on it. That’s where your keyword priorities are fleshed out.

Unless you have an unlimited budget, all marketing budgets are essentially an exercise in resource allocation and prioritization. When you sit down to choose the keywords you want to target for your SEO campaign, it’s a zero-sum game. A dollar spent on one keyword means a dollar not spent on another keyword.

The money you make on your SEO campaign, all things being equal, is a function of which keywords you’ve chosen to go after first, and which ones you’ve chosen to save for later. This starts with your keyword analysis. A smart SEO strategy is to round out your targeted keywords with a balanced amount of firepower each month going toward short-term, mid-term, and long-term ranking objectives.

If you spend all your budget on the big-money keywords–the ones everyone and their brother wants to rank on Page 1 for–you will likely run out of capital and patience before you get there and give up. If you balance your keyword targeting with easier but profitable keywords along the way, with other mid-term and longer-term targets, you can pay the bills by bringing in new business, while still investing the time and resources necessary to eventually make it onto Page 1 for the big-money keywords.

SEO is a marathon, not a sprint, as they say, and like all marathons, it starts with a solid foundation of prep-work. That’s your keyword research. And don’t assume you can plug in a few keywords to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and call it a day. Software helps, but they are no replacement for human judgment here.

When designing your SEO campaign, we start with some deep insight into your business and how it generates revenue. Is it a direct sales model, or does it take time to nurture prospects? What keywords do prospects search for? What keywords do the impulse buyers in your market search for? Are there overlooked keywords that don’t have a lot of competition we can optimize for, and build up to the high-dollar rankings in the process?

All these questions are a part of our SEO keyword research. There is nothing boilerplate or machine-generated about it. We use software for keyword discovery and to obtain traffic metrics, but we apply solid marketing principles to be able to provide you with recommendations for your SEO target keywords.

With the right mix of keyword research and quality SEO services, you can win the SEO marathon by breaking it up into a lot of smaller, winnable races. Call us today to get started!