Where to start with keyword research for a telecom company?

[HasanPK]

Hey,

I'm a brand's person with no SEO experience, yet I'm in a position where I have to carry out an SEO audit of our telecom company's website. Though our website is up and running for some years now, nobody bothered to undertake keyword research. From the little I've read over months on SEOmoz, I've just done the following: took out keywords bringing organic traffic on to our website and checked our rankings for those keywords on major search engines.

My observation is that most of these words are long-tail keywords. Since we only have product/service information related to our offerings, most of the head terms we've used for packages/offers/services pages are branded keywords. My understanding is that we need to rank top for our branded keywords (a must) and try to rank as high as possible for long tail. In addition, we can use those keywords in our copy so that the right page ranks top for the respective keyword. Am I missing anything here? What else do I need to do?

[AAttias]

Yes, if you have a good page rank then you should be able to compete for the most competitive keywords. However, you will need to optimise your site for these keywords correctly.

[HasanPK]

I have a page rank of 5 according to SEO book. Being a leading operator in the market, I think I should go for competitive keywords with 300+ searches a month, yes?

[AAttias]

The best thing to do is to each page of your website targeting at different keyword. Use the keyword tool in Adwords to tell you discover how popular keyword terms are and their competitiveness. As a rule I would never target keywords with less than 300 searches per month, as they're unlikely to give you any decent traffic. Unless your site has a PageRank of more than 5, you shouldn't be targeting keywords that are highly competitive, you should build links into your site, increase your PR and then target those keywords.

[HasanPK]

Hey Brian,

Thanks for the response. By telecom company, I meant like AT&T or Verizon in US. Though all these providers have somewhat similar services, they are branded differently. But then there are generic keywords that users search for. The problem I'm facing is in deciding what keywords to target and where (copy, headings etc.)