SEO: ROI and Keyword Selection
The selection of keywords is vital in an SEO campaign. For example if you were a web design company should you go after the phrase Web Design or Web Designers?
The first thing you should examine is how much traffic each keyword would generate. 
From Google Adword KeyWord Tool: Web Designers received 49,500 and Web Design received 823,000 (both for Feb 09).
Another consideration is how competitive each keyword is. Using SEOChat (Keyword Difficulty Tool) Web Design has a SEO Difficulty level of 82%, whereas Web Designers has a SEO Difficulty level of 67% meaning it’s much harder to optimise for Web Design.
Also you should consider the likely ROI (Return on Investment) for these phrases. You can find this out over time but I would suspect Web Designers will have a slightly higher ROI than Web Design as it is a more targeted, specific keyword. However this is countered by the fact that Web Design receives around 15 times more traffic than Web Designers.
Ultimately you will receive more enquiries if you successfully optimise for Web Design but you should bear in mind that this phrase will take longer to get listed successfully via the search engines and will also be more expensive to optimise for.
I would overall advise the client based on their budget and expected timeframe for results. If they wanted to achieve long term listings, and they had sufficient budget, then I would recommend the phrase Web Design. If there budget was smaller, and they expected success a bit quicker, then I would probably recommend the phrase Web Designers.
The phrase Web Design is a very competitive phrase and your SEO company would have to be very good at what they do to achieve successful results so I wouldn’t just choose the cheapest SEO company.
We believe you should always check with an SEO company the following – Can they achieve results for themselves because if they can’t then how can the achieve results for you? Type Web Design into Google and you will see our sister company as the top listed company (just behind Wikipedia). I think listing for the phrase Web Design is good proof we practise what we preach.
