Marketing SEO Strategies, Drive Traffic Using Alternate Keywords

Optimize SEO Marketing with Strategies Using Alternate Keywords or "Longtail" Keywords That Focus on Sub Niche Targets to Dominate Your Competition

Today we're going to look at alternate keywords and how to use them to quickly dominate the search engine results. When talking about this strategy, it is important to understand why alternate keywords are important, what are "longtail" keywords, and to also cover some examples of alternate keywords to some commonly searched terms.

 A common question when doing SEO work is "What are alternate keywords?", and how do they help? Alternate keywords are words you can use that are related to your primary search term, but are not your primary search term. A good example of this is can be found in the legal field. In the legal field, many lawyers are eager to rank well for the very broad and very highly competitive terms "attorney", "attorneys", and "lawyers". These terms are often paired with their field of practice, such as "bankruptcy attorney" or "bankruptcy attorneys". The problem with this is that the top competitors are often very hard to dislodge, and paying for Google AdWords can be very, very costly, at over $16/click!

So, it is important to find related words that are not as heavily targeted.

Good alternative keywords often involve competing for your keyword string and your city. For instance, "bankruptcy attorneys Dallas" gets 1600 searches per month, versus "bankruptcy attorneys" which gets 246,000 searches per month! That's a lot higher search rate, and it puts it firmly out of most people's reach. So, you can see how incorporating a simple word like your city can return dramatic differences in the search results. Once you've conquered your city, expand to surrounding cities, your county, and your zip code plus surrounding zip codes. This will allow you to lock in all of the local business that consumers will search for. So, you can gain top listings in Google by expanding out from your city, to surrounding cities, to your zip code and county.

Another type of alternate keyword is what's called the "long tail" keyword. Again, the idea here is that shorter keyword phrases, such as "make money online" are too long to properly compete with (with over 1 MILLION searches per month!), and so you should add additional words on the end of that to be more competitive and capture a share of the market. A leading longtail keyword right now is "make money online now" which has many, many, fewer searches per month (12,000) than "make money online". You can see that this is still a good traffic volume each month, and it will be much easier to compete on than the the original keyword string. It's amazing what a difference one word makes, isn't it?

So, as you can see, finding alternate keywords for commonly searched terms are very easy. You simply need to add a few words at the end of your normal search terms to really rank well in the search engines. Some common alternative keyword add-ons are "now", "fast", "online", and your city or county. Misspellings are often very common, as are other synonyms, like "lawyers" instead of "attorneys".

Good luck in your search domination, and remember, if you need help locking down the first page of the search engines, find me at www.l7marketingsolutions.com.