Another important consideration in this process is the purchase intent or buyer intent of the keyword. Someone that is manually searching “are dentists open over Christmas” is very likely to be looking to make a visitation especially considering the time of year they are searching for this keyword. This is referred to as a keyword trend, we can expect that someone searching this keyword at the end of the year towards December is highly likely to be considering a dental visitation over the Christmas period.
When we consider the search term “what do dentists use to whiten teeth” this lacks buyers intent as it could just be someone looking for a DIY solution to a dental problem they have and is much less likely someone looking to book an appointment with our dental practice. However if we were looking to sell a dental product that provided this solution it may be a keyword we target,
Does this mean high difficulty keywords are pointless? Well, that depends. If we consider the amount of traffic both keywords generate then it will make more sense to invest our time into the easiest keyword as there is a much higher chance, we will see a return on that time investment with rankings in the search engine results pages. However, this will also depend on the domain authority (DA) of your website.
Domain authority refers to the amount of credibility that Google and other search engines grant your website and is based on a wide variety of factors such as domain age, link profile and topical authority which are subjects we will cover individually in a later post. What you need to understand is that not all websites are equal when it comes to competing for a keyword well established websites with high domain authority can compete for more competitive keywords.