Know-How Exchange : SEO/SEM

I would suggest looking at your competition to see what they are doing. You can also go to google sandbox to evaluate your keywords. Google will show you a graph on how often keywords are used. You can also go to www.buildtelligence.com and click on "On line Tools" to evaluate your site and keywords to see where you will come up in the results.

You've got a lot of competition, so focus on a niche's need for IT: pizza parlors, realtors, non-profits, etc. The narrower the niche, the easier it is for them to find you.

Write down all the keywords that you think are relevant to your site. Then go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and paste them in the keyword box and click 'Get Keyword ideas'. This will analyze the keyword phrases that you think are relevant to your business and instead generate actual searches that people are performing.

Now, if you want to know how many people are looking for that particular keyword every day, try https://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ . It isn't always accurate, and you can scan for a correction of their results by using https://google.com/trends. If you need to know more about that last technique, just ask me, and I'll produce you a video on how it is done (it is easier when it is visually explained.)

Don't forget to use LOCAL terms that reflect your city, state, etc.

People probably don't just look for "IT consultant," they look for "[city] IT consultant."

jcasalou

This relates more to how you use keywords in PPC. Remember 80% of your clicks probably come from 20% of your keywords.

Focus on what gets results NOW and build out from there.

Unless you are focusing on long-tail marketing and have very high conversion rates, it's almost certain that 80% of your keywords are simply costing you money for no return.

Might be better to look at reducing and eliminating (and using negative keywords to eliminate "tyre-kickers") in order to increase results.

More is not always better.

Hope that helps.

ChrisB