Keywords are the basic building block of web traffic.  Associate your site with the right keywords and you get a steady flow of quality traffic.  Associate your site with the wrong keywords and you get to watch electronic tumbleweeds blow down the main street of your home page.

Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is the process of associating your site with keywords.  SEO is like gardening, you can plant seeds and encourage growth in a certain way, but the exact way your efforts “grow” are largely out of your hands.  And, nothing happens instantly.  You SEO efforts will take weeks or months to deliver returns.

So what happens if you optimize the wrong keywords?  More importantly, what can you do to pick the right keywords before you start?

What are the “right keywords?”

The right keywords convert to sales, leads, opt-ins, downloads – whatever metric you use to measure the success of your site.  Those may or may not be the highest volume terms you found in your keyword research (you did keyword research, right?).  The distinction is critical because the ultimate measure of success is your bank account balance, not the number of site visitors.

Test your keywords first

So, how do we make sure we’re optimizing on the right keywords?  We test them using pay-per-click.

Always test your keywords using pay-per-click before you spend the time and effort to optimize your site for those keywords.  PPC is the fastest and easiest way to test keywords because the traffic – and therefore the feedback – is almost immediate.

Think of the traffic from PPC like a speedboat.  It goes from zero to full speed quickly, stops just as fast, and can turn on a dime.  It’s the perfect vehicle for testing because changes can be implemented and results observed in minutes, or at most, days.

Think of the traffic from organic SEO like a cruise ship.  It takes a while to get started, takes a very long time to stop, and needs a lot of room to change course.  Changes to organic SEO could take months before you see the effects.

Yes, a PPC campaign to test your keywords might cost you a few hundred dollars.  But think of how many times that investment will pay for itself as you convert organic traffic for months and years into the future because you picked the right keywords.