Vox Fortis Communications

The pup has a fascination with the ice cube dispenser on my fridge. It grinds up the cubes (because crushed ice is really the only way to go) and she sits there, ears perked, waiting for the magical ice chunks to plunk onto the floor.

This isn’t unlike finding and deciding on your keywords in several ways, believe it or not.

Some are bigger than others.

When people search, it’s like they’re at a doorway, and when someone enters their search term and hits “enter” 50,000 people want to charge through the entryway. Google is the hall monitor that helps arrange them in a more orderly fashion, but those other sites are still your competition.

When the dog sits there and waits for the ice cube, she’s going to gravitate towards the bigger ones…the problem is, if they’re TOO big, they won’t fit through the dispenser. They need to be ground down a little more.

Pick SEO keywords that are in the sweet spot.

If you pick something like “freelance design” for example, you’re going to have trouble unless you’re someone really well-known. Access to a robust SEO tool is your best friend when it comes to saving yourself time on competing for words that have insane competition. I always try and find what I refer to as the “sweet spot” for clients: words that get decently searched, but that don’t have the whole world as competition.

So take the previous example. Let’s say you’re a freelance designer, and there are a few thousand searches a day for that term, but millions of pages that you’d be competing with…get creative. Check into searches for freelance design specific to your area, or explore the option to add adjectives in front of the term like “affordable.” Granted, the search volume won’t be as high as something like “freelance design,” but you’re not going to get any of that traffic by trying to compete with the biggies anyway.

Start with the big ice cube, and grind it down.

Look at those biggies first. Don’t avoid the huge terms you know you can’t compete on, but use them as the big ice cube you whittle away at until it’s small enough to fit through a relevant search.

The eager searchers on the other side of the screen will snap you up when your smaller cube fits through the door.