Keyword Research
Big brands (i.e. big corporations) have some distinct advantages over small businesses: big brands have a ton of money so they can produce a constant stream of website content; Google favors big brands and makes it easier for them to perform well in the search engines; big brands are less likely to get penalized for aggressive SEO tactics and only get a slap on the wrist when they do so. All of this means that big brands can rank for just about anything…if they know what they’re doing.
Fortunately for you, big brands rarely take full advantage of these opportunities. You are more nimble. You are more resourceful. You are more dedicated to pursuing a streamlined SEO strategy that avoids the fluff and focuses on driving profitable traffic.
Keyword research is an integral part of that strategy.
Take your time with keyword research, because it will affect every other aspect of your SEO strategy that follows.
- Take Control of Your Keywords
- What Makes a Good Keyword?
- How Long Should Your Targeted Keyword Phrases Be?
- Find and Assess Keywords
Take Control of Your Keywords
There are a host of disreputable SEO snake oil salesmen who will guarantee you #1 rankings for “your” keywords. Keep the following in mind the next time you speak to one of them:
- Those “your keywords” these shady SEO companies refer to are actually the keywords that they chooses for you, which are typically very easy to rank for because they are not competitive. They’re not competitive because no one is searching for them and they won’t make you any money.
- No SEO firm can guarantee #1 rankings, because ultimately it’s the search engines themselves who decide what sites go to the top of the list. Algorithms change and so will your rankings, so unless they backup their guarantees with a refund policy, they’re all talk.
- With the increasing trend for personalized search results and other search engine strategies, you will never rank in the same position for every person who is searching for your keywords.
Don’t get me wrong – for as many crooks-masquerading-as-SEOs out there, you’ll find just as many honest, hard-working and reputable SEO providers. But even if you work with a good SEO firm, you should take responsibility for your keyword selection. Stay involved in the research and selection process.
Most likely, the SEO company won’t be an expert in your industry, BUT YOU ARE! You should already have a good idea of the nuances of terminology and jargon used by your customers, which will give you a good starting point for launching more in-depth keyword research.
What Makes a Good Keyword?
In order to decide which keywords to focus on, you need to determine what constitutes a good keyword. Defining what a good keyword is may vary by industry and product, but here are a few general principles to guide your decision:
Volume
A good keyword gets searched often. Since the search is the top of your sales funnel, the more people you have going into the top, the more sales you get coming out of the bottom.
Accurate Description of What the Searcher Will Find When They Click Through
A good keyword will lead the searcher to relevant content. Getting a page about toenail clippers ranked for “Viagra” would drive a lot of traffic, but it wouldn’t sell too many toenail clippers.
Matched Query Type
People will be at different points in the sales cycle when they find your site. You can use your keywords to target groups of people in the same part of the cycle and send them to the appropriate part of your site. Most searches will fall in a spectrum ranging from informational to commercial.
It is helpful to think of this keyword search spectrum as buckets. Depending on the intent behind the searches in each bucket, searchers will respond to your website content differently. Three basic buckets are informational, decision-making and commercial. Or another way to look at them is awareness, influence and action. You want to make sure you match each keyword bucket with appropriate content on your website so the searchers can find what they’re looking for and you can give them the right marketing message at the right time.
People early in the sales cycle are still doing research, so they will be searching for informational keyword phrases, and not necessarily looking to buy anything. They might not even know anything substantial about your product or industry yet. For instance, when you first learned about SEO, you may have done a lot of searches like “what is seo” or “how to do seo” or “how to get to the top of google,” hoping to find free information and learn more about the subject.
People who already know about the product or market are in a position where awareness of your business may affect their decision-making product. The more they see your name show up, the more likely they are to remember you. Staying at the top of the search engines is a good way to influence their decision-making process. A lot of the searches performed by these people will involve keyword phrases involving “reviews” or “comparisons” as they try to sort out the differences between the various providers.
The last group of people is ready to take action. They know what they want and just need to find the place to get it. These might be commercial transactions or your organization may have other goals such as newsletter signups or lead generation.
All of these query types can be profitable for your business. You don’t have to focus solely on the commercial terms to make money, although those terms will often make you money the fastest.
The important step to take here is to identify which keywords belong in which bucket. Later on we’ll talk about how to match those keywords to the appropriate destination pages. Once you get them there, you’ll also need to know how to convert informational and decision-making searchers into buyers (I’ll give you a few tip for this later, but the details are beyond the scope of this tutorial). Informational searchers may be a slower-converting group, but that gives you more time to build a relationship of trust with them and turn them into long-term customers.
How Long Should Your Targeted Keyword Phrases Be?
If you’ve spent much time reading about Internet marketing, you’ve probably heard talk of the “long tail.”
Basically, your industry will likely attract a large number of searches from a few primary keyword phrases. These phrases will tend to be short (one or two words long, maybe three) and very broad in nature. These are the phrases found at the head of the graph (left side).
The rest of the searches will come from longer, more specific keyword phrases that individually generate very few searches. These are the keyword phrases found at the tail of the graph (right side). This is the “long tail.” Although these phrases get few searches individually, aggregately the tail accounts for more searches than the head (theoretically).
So which should you optimize for, the head or the tail?
The short answer is “both.”
| Pro | Con | |
| Head | Lots of traffic from a few words. | More competitive to rank. |
| Tail | Lots of traffic from many words. Less competitive to rank. | Requires a lot more content. |
If you’re website is already well-established and has been around for several years, than you might be able to go ahead and push for the head keyword phrases, especially if your industry is niche enough. If you’re trying to compete in a huge vertical like finance or dieting or something, getting ranked for your head keywords will be super expensive.
If your website is relatively new and your brand relatively unknown – or if you’re competing in one of those huge verticals – then I would normally suggest starting on the long tail keywords as your primary focus. Once you start ranking for the long tail keywords and building traffic and brand equity in your market, it will be easier (and cheaper) to start attacking the head.
The other benefit of long tail keywords is that these are more likely to be your “money” words. For instance, people searching for a specific product or service are more likely to be searching with commercial intent and therefore more likely to convert into a customer if their search leads them to your site (which, of course, offers them exactly what they were looking for). For instance, someone searching for “bookkeepers” will be less likely to become a paying customer than someone searching for “orlando bookkeepers for small businesses” (assuming you specialize in SMB accounting services in Orlando).
Long story short: in general, you want to start long tail but plan and prepare for the head down the road.
Find and Assess Keywords
Now that we understand some of the attributes of good keywords, how do we find them? There are many resources available to do this, more than I could realistically cover in this tutorial. So here are a few of the best which, for the most part, are also free.
Forums and Community Sites
Find out where prospective customers congregate. Many industries have popular forums where people gather together to discuss their topic, share information and vent. What are your clients talking about? What kind of language do they use to describe it? There are some keywords worth investigating!
Pay special attention to that venting. Not only will you learn what language (i.e. keyword phrases) people use to describe your products, but you’ll also learn what frustrations and problems people have that aren’t getting solved to their satisfaction. Armed with that knowledge, you can create a solution AND get yourself ranked for the relevant keyword phrases to drive traffic to it.
For instance, if you sell gluten-free food, there is a forum at http://www.celiac.com/gluten-free/. Go see what people with gluten intolerance are talking about and what kind of problems they have that aren’t getting solved easily. Solving those problems and ranking for the keyword phrases they’re searching for is a good start toward profitability.
Also, don’t be afraid to get involved in these forums. A lot of this data can be gathered by participating in the discussions, asking more in-depth questions and building relationships with forum members.
Analytics and Site Search Data
If you already have a website, you hopefully have some sort of analytics package installed (like Google Analytics, Mint, etc.). Or, maybe you have access to your log files (if you’re not sure, ask your hosting provider). This can provide two very important pieces of information:
- The keyword phrases that are already sending traffic to your website
- The keyword phrases people are typing into the search box once they’re already on your website (you have a search box, right?)
For the phrases that are already sending traffic to your site, see where you rank in the search engines. The fact that you’re already getting traffic means there is potential to get more if you rank higher. If you’re already on page two or three of the SERPs for a keyword phrase, then it’s probably a good candidate to push to page one.
The phrases that show up in your site searches are a great indication of what people actually need and aren’t finding. They arrive on a page of your site, don’t immediately see what they’re looking for, and tell you exactly what they want by typing it into the search box. These phrases are also great candidates for optimization.
Google Keyword Tool
Do you have a Google AdWords account? If so, log in, go the “Opportunities” tab and find the Keyword Tool in the sidebar. Your interface may look a little different than the image below, but the concept is the same.
If don’t have an account, go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.
- Enter one of your industry’s primary keywords and click the button
- Change the “Choose columns to display” to “Show All”
- Change the Match Type to “Exact” (you may also want to try this process using the “Phrase” match type)
You should then see a list of related keywords with several columns of data. Don’t be too concerned with the exact search count. Look at the number of monthly searches relative to each other to determine which keywords have potential to drive significant traffic to your website.
Also note the search volume trends to see if there is any seasonality. Does this seasonality mirror any seasonality you may see in your sales?
The Advertiser Competition and Estimated Avg. CPC (cost-per-click) columns refer to pay-per-click advertising, but can also be very useful for your SEO strategy. Notice the keywords with higher advertiser competition and higher CPC. In most cases, advertisers wouldn’t compete so heavily on keywords unless they were delivering more value than they cost. If you can rank highly for those phrases in the organic search engine listings, then you have a good chance of success.
You can also use the Keyword Tool to generate keywords based on other websites’ content. This is helpful if you have established competitors or industry hubs that already get a lot of traffic from you target customers.
- Switch the keyword generation option from “Descriptive words or phrases” to “Website content”
- Type a website URL and click the button
- Make sure the columns you want to see are active and the Match Type is changed to Exact
This method will discover keywords based on the content of the website you entered. So what websites should you enter? Here are a few suggestions:
- The top competitor in your industry, especially if you know they’ve already done SEO on their site – they’ve probably already discovered a lot of the profitable keywords and implemented them into their content
- Amazon.com – if they have a section that aligns with the niche you’re in, navigate to that page, copy the URL and paste it in to the Keyword Tool
- Yahoo Directory, DMOZ or other directories – if there is a directory section that covers your niche, use that page
- Other directories, forums or portals specific to your industry
Using other website URLs in this fashion will help you build a massive list of keywords with actionable data very quickly.
Pay Per Click Advertising
All the other methods for keyword selection and assessment that I’ve mentioned so far have been free to use. This one isn’t, but it’s one of the best methods I know of to make sure you get the right keywords…
Put down some cold hard cash and run a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign.
Since this method costs money to implement and may require a considerable amount of time to do it right, I’m going to call it “optional.” However, let me stress that I never start a major SEO endeavor without testing keywords in PPC first.
Here is a 3-step tactical overview of this method (I’ll provide some links to the details below):
- Take the keywords you’ve discovered with the previously-mentioned methods and sponsor them in AdWords
- Give yourself a budget of a few hundred dollars (at most – you might be able to get by with as little as $50 in some markets)
- Set up conversion tracking so you can see not only which keywords drive traffic, but which ones turn into paying customers
Remember, you don’t just want traffic, you want quality traffic. PPC will help you determine which keywords will actually make sales, and therefore which ones are worth optimizing for.
Since PPC is a completely different animal than SEO, I can’t do it justice here – it would require another guide as dense as this one. But here are a few resources to help you get started:
- https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=learningcenter.cs
- http://ppcblog.com/
Resources
- Long Tail Keywords and How They Affect Your SEO Budget
- Google Analytics
- Mint
- Google External Keyword Tool
- AdWords
- Yahoo! Marketing Solutions
- Microsoft AdCenter
