For this week’s assignment, we were to use SEO functions to choose the best keywords that would target our desired demographic. I began by identifying a competitor of Focus Marketing Group, Mittag Design. I took Mittag Design’s URL (https://www.mittagdesign.com/) and pasted it into THEHOTH, which is a free Google rank checker. From there I identified rankings with high search volume and low traffic, of which I decided on ‘mittag’.

Then I went to AHREFS (a keyword generator) and typed in mittag as that is the name of my company, which brought me to this page. My keyword will be mittag design but to expand on the idea I also looked up livestock marketing. I like livestock marketing because it is broad but very effective.

Next I made my way to Google Trends to see what other words may be popular, especially in our given region. Focus Marketing Group primarily works with livestock farmers and ranchers so I searched ‘livestock’ and came up with some interesting results. It is most popularly searched in South Dakota and that is one of the states in our desired region!

Beneath this section was a spot called related queries which gave me a few options but the highest-ranked one was “livestock auction”. I got many results that worked for the whole United States but to get more region-specific keywords I also used the South Dakota-related queries and the top four with an easy or medium keyword are ‘livestock agent’, ‘livestock auction near me’, ‘hub city livestock’ and ‘hub city livestock auction’.

For the final step in this very in-depth dive into SEO, I made my way over to Google Ads. After adding a few keywords that I thought were compatible with both my mission and Focus Marketing Group, it gave me a few results in order to get some easy to rank keyword ideas with high potential of traffic.

I see that it has given me quite a few options. The top three are all things that both companies can relate to. So I will be taking organic farming, agriculture website, and sustainable agriculture into the AHREFS website to look for more keywords.

When I input organic farming into the AHREFS website I got multiple keyword options but I chose to use ‘cons of organic farming’ and ‘what is organic farming’. After searching I got very good feedback. An easy KD (aka keyword difficulty) means it is easy to rank, meaning with the right optimization of the keyword it would not take much work on the company’s side to gain traction in the area. It is also important to note that any of these words would be more than suitable for the job. I did the same process for agriculture website and I chose ‘agriculture website design’ and ‘agriculture design templates’. Finally, I did it to sustainable agriculture and chose ‘sustainable agriculture jobs’ and ‘sustainable agriculture methods’. There is obviously a market for it and can be a great opportunity for Focus Marketing Group!