This is the very first and most important step: determining which keywords you want to use to position your website. If you have an online store and, for example, sell a lot of T-shirts, the answer is obvious. Or is it? Indeed, you will never be able to position your web resource on the first page of Google with just a single word, unless it’s an exceptionally large site. Thus, it is not a coincidence that on the first page of Google France we find Zalendo or Intersport.
Fortunately, this does not matter because this query is very general: of course, we might just be looking for “tee-shirt”, but the results will be too vague, and most Internet users will prefer more targeted searches, such as “personalized tee-shirt” or “Batman t-shirt”. This is good because the more words there are in the query, the easier it is to position yourself well. These examples are still extremely competitive, but let’s suppose you have a specialty, for example « 80s style t-shirt » then the competition is much less stiff. You might rank high on this search and, once your prospects are on your site, we may hope that they will also be interested in your other lines of t-shirts.
These queries have a name: these are called « long-tail » keywords, they are made up of at least three or four words. The more complex the search query is, the fewer results it returns and the more competitive you are. If you have a limited budget, the « long tail » is your only hope for good positioning in Google.
To help yourself, you can study your competitors’ keywords and estimate whether you think you can position above them. There are many tools, and some of them are free.
