SEO Keyword Question!!

[styles303]

Hi guys

This is my first site and I'm and learning a nice bit of SEO atm which I do find interesting,
It is a site that rents bicycles, for discussions sake let's say its in Paris, but I do not know
if I should use 'Paris bike rental' or 'Paris bike hire' as the keywords for my site
since both hire and rental are used by people to search.

Does it matter that in google the phrase 'Bike hire' has 4 times the results as 'Bike Rental' for my town that is?

I am a total novice so excuse me if im coming at this at the wrong angle.

Thanks

k

[mobilegames]

first check google keyword tools to know which keyword has more search queries and low or medium competition.Choose the one which has low competition and use other keywords in your description

[andy_danes]

There are programs that could help you with choosing the best keywords for your product. I think Google adwords is good.

[GeraldNitram]

Have you tried the Google Adwords Keyword Tool that mobilegames was talking about? You might find the keywords that you need there. About the number of results, think of them as your competition. Well, maybe not all of them, but I think it's good if you're going to look at way. The goal of SEO is to bring your site up the search result rankings as high as possible. If you're looking to target those in your community, since you've mentioned a very lovely city, let's go with Paris. It's good if you're going to include those keywords that have your target area in it. Another good suggestion would be targeting the nearby areas within a certain radius around your main target area.

[TechnoBear]

It is a site that rents bicycles, for discussions sake let's say its in Paris, but I do not know
if I should use 'Paris bike rental' or 'Paris bike hire' as the keywords for my site
since both hire and rental are used by people to search.

Does it matter that in google the phrase 'Bike hire' has 4 times the results as 'Bike Rental' for my town that is?

Oddly enough, one of my sites is for bicycle hire.

The first question to ask yourself is, what phrase would the majority of your customers use? Here, we would say "cycle hire" or "bike hire", but never rental. However, a significant proportion of the customers are from abroad and therefore not native English speakers, and most of these do seem to use the word rental, rather than hire. So the site is optimised for hire (the majority of customers), but also features if rental is used.

On the basis of the Google stats, it would appear that "bike hire" is the more popular phrase for your area and probably the one to go with, but just bear in mind that you're aiming this at real people, if your customers are likely to be atypical. And bear in mind also that you can always tweek things and make adjustments as you go along, as you learn more about both SEO and your visitors.

[Mikl]

Keep in mind too that Google is pretty good at figuring out that "hire" and "rental" mean roughly the same thing. So if you get it wrong, it won't be a disaster.

That said, I agree that you need to use the term that is most commonly used by your target audience. In the UK, we would almost always say "hire", but Americans are more likely to say "rental".

Mike

[seotrafficsearch]

Its easy to come to a conclusion. Simply search the traffic volume for each keyword, i.e Rent and hire. Also find out the competition for each of them. Weigh the competition and traffic volume for each keywords and choose the one which would be profitable. You could use Google Adwords Tool to do the keyword research.

[Mikl]

And, of course, you don't have to choose one or the other. You can make sure that both "rental" and "hire" appear in the text of the page, if not both in the title (without resorting to keyword stuffing, of course).

Mike

[TechnoBear]

Well it's nice that everybody seems to agree which tool to use. Now we've established that Google Adwords Keyword Tool is the biz, we don't need anybody else joining in to say so. Of course, if you have something to add that hasn't already been said, please do share it.

[styles303]

Thanks a lot for your replies, i'm definitely clearer about it now.
From google adwords results, bike hire gets marginally higher searches than bike rental so maybe
I can include both but I will keep in mind Mikl's point that google might recognize them as the same.

By the way I uploaded the site yesterday along with a sitemap . . I presume it take a few weeks
to reach a settled position? today its rankings at 100+ on google for 'bike hire', note that there is competition of
only a few more businesses/websites in the town I live so the objective is to definitely get
in the top 3. What should be I expecting from here and Is there anything else I should be doing?

[GeraldNitram]

I just remembered something moments ago. Whenever I'm checking my ranks on the search results pages, I would usually check them both manually, and through tools like ahrefs and SEOCentro's rank checker. The latter has this feature that shares you the related keywords when you type in your main keyword and check for your rank on the SERPs. You can just Google SEOCentro rank checker if you want to check it out.

[barrybowen1]

you have to look for which keywords people looking most, if people looking for Paris bike rental most then you should use this keywords and also you can use Paris bike hire if this keyword have searches, so mostly keywords depend on searches . if keyword have searches then you should use and if no searches then no benefit if you using.