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Archive for August, 2006
The Basic Keyword Strategy: Part IV — Keyword popularity
The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book Winning The Search Engine Wars.
To learn more about Search Engine News, click here.
[Note: Continued from the Keyword Competition sub-tutorial, part two of our Keyword Research Tutorial]
Keyword Popularity
The fourth question: popularity
Theoretically, this question should be easy to answer. All we need are some stats of how many times people have actually searched for a given term in the past to get some sort of reasonable assessment of how popular a term will be in the future. In reality, though, it’s not quite that simple.
For starters, there is no central source of data which can provide us with statistics which relates to the internet as a whole. Rather, we have to rely on various sources of data, each of which relates to a limited percentage of search traffic. Secondly, not every organization is as forth-coming with their data as others. For instance, Google offers relative data, but no actual numbers. I.e, they will tell you relatively speaking how popular a keyword is, but they won’t actually tell us how many people searched for that term. Thirdly, often times the data that is available is skewed for one reason or another (as is explained in our Keyword Tools Tutorial). Finally, we aren’t really interested in how popular a keyword is in general, but rather how popular a keyword is in relationship to your product or services. However, many keywords can be used to search for numerous, un-related products or services. Take the phrase cell phone. This is a rather popular term, with Yahoo Search reporting over four million searches a month in the Yahoo network alone. However, not everyone is searching for the same thing. Some people are looking to buy a cell phone, some to rent. Some people are interested in a cell phone plan, while others are looking for a cell phone directory. Therefore, this number of four million is somewhat misleading as there are not four million relevant searches. Of course, at four million searches a month that fact might not be so significant, but most keywords aren’t nearly that popular. If, for example, a keyword has only 10,000 or 1,000 searches per month than this fact becomes more important.
Given the various problems with statistical data with regards to the popularity of a keyword it is worth while cross checking data from a number of sources. Otherwise, these figures should be used as an approximation of the popularity of the phrase not as hard facts. Also, it is worth noting the relative popularity of a keyword to other, similarly related keywords. Often times there are closely related words which are both worth optimizing for. If you notice that one phrase seems to be more popular than the other then it is most likely worth while to optimize for that phrase (assuming, of course, that there is no significant difference in the competition for that keyword).
Next tutorial: How to build a Keyword List
Previous tutorial: Keyword Competition
This tutorial written by:
Moshe Morris
President of SEMBasics
Chief Research Analyst at Internet Marketing Initiative (www.internetmi.com)
The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book Winning The Search Engine Wars.
To learn more about Search Engine News, click here.
The Basic Keyword Strategy: Part III — Keyword Competition
The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book Winning The Search Engine Wars.
To learn more about Search Engine News, click here.
[Note: Continued from the Relevant Keywords and Customer Motivation Tutorial, part II of our Basic Keyword Keyword Strategy Tutorial]
Keyword Competition
The Third Question: Competition
When it comes to your competition there are two points that are important to remember. The first is that your real competition for any particular keyword are the top sites which show up in the major search engine for that keyword. If your site is better optimized for a keyword than those sites then eventually your site should outrank them. The second point is that just because you can’t compete for a particular keyword today does not mean that you will not be able to compete for it tomorrow. As your optimization efforts begin to bear fruit your site will start to gain "momentum" which can be used to compete for keywords which heretofore were untouchable. As such, it is important that you organize your keywords according to their competitiveness, optimizing your site for those keywords which you can compete for today, and saving more difficult keywords tomorrow.
Assessing the competitiveness of a keyword
When assessing the competitiveness of a keyword, there are two basic elements that one wants to look at. The first is the quantity and quality of incoming links both to the site as a whole, as well as the individual page which shows up in the search engine results. The second is what is known as On page optimization. On page optimization refers to the numerous "techniques" that one can employ to help a particular web page rank well for a particular keyword. Both of these issues will be explored in greater detail in later tutorials. For now, what is crucial to understand is that a site which has a large number of high quality incoming links which is also well optimized for a particular keyword will be difficult to compete against. On the other hand, a site with few and/or low quality incoming links which is not well optimized for a particular keyword will be easy to compete against. And, of course, there are numerous sites in-between these extremes which will be more
or less difficult to compete against depending upon the factors we mentioned above.
It also needs to be pointed out that it is often times difficult to analyze the competitiveness of your keywords. After all, it is not unlikely that you will have hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of keywords eligible for optimization. For most people it is not feasible to analyze the top sites in the search engine results for each and every keyword. As such, one needs a means of analyzing large numbers of keywords at once which, at the very least, gives an indication as to whether or not a keyword is likely to be competitive or not. Currently, the best procedure that we are aware of is to utilize the advanced search features of Google in conjunction with special software programs. In particular, we are interested in two search features known as the intitle (or allintitle) and inanchor (or allinanchor). The intitle search feature shows us how many sites have a particular keyword in the title tag of their HTML code. The title tag is one of the meta tags which appears in the HTML code of your web pages. The inanchor search feature shows us how many sites have a particular keyword in the anchor text of an incoming link. Anchor text is text which is hyperlinked to another page on the internet. For example, the words,keyword strategy are hyperlinked to our keyword strategy tutorial. As such they are the anchor text of that link.
What is important to understand about the intitle and inanchor search features is that they show us nothing about the quality of either the On page optimization or incoming links to a web site. At best, they merely report how many sites you are competing against. What seems reasonable, though, is to infer from the number of sites that you are competing against the quality of your competition. Remember, we mentioned above that in reality you are only competing against the top sites that show up in the search engine for any particular keyword. Chances are, though, that if there are a lot of sites competing for that top spot then the site that wins that coveted spot is well optimized (after all, there are a lot of people vying for that spot, as such it takes more to both obtain and maintain that position). Conversely, if there is less competition for a particular keyword than chances are that the top sites are not so well optimized (after all, they can maintain their position with minimal effort).
To learn more about analyzing the competitiveness of a keyword see our keyword analysis tutorial.
Next tutorial: Keyword Popularity
Previous tutorial: Relevant Keywords and Customer Motivation
This tutorial written by:
Moshe Morris
President of SEMBasics
Chief Research Analyst at Internet Marketing Initiative (www.internetmi.com)
The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book Winning The Search Engine Wars.
To learn more about Search Engine News, click here.
The Basic Keyword Strategy: Part II — Relevant Keywords and Customer Motivation
The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book Winning The Search Engine Wars.
To learn more about Search Engine News, click here.
[Note: Continued from the Valuable Keywords Tutorial, part I of our Basic Keyword Keyword Strategy Tutorial]
Relevant Keywords
As we mentioned in our keyword strategy tutorial, there are four questions that one needs to answer in order to find those profitable keywords which can help make your search optimization campaign a success. They are the following:
- Does the keyword relate to your products or services?
- Why are your customers searching for any particular keyword?
- How much competition is there for your keywords?
- How popular are your keywords?
These four questions are designed to help focus your keyword research efforts on the information that you need to succeed. Therefore, a better understanding of each of these questions will help improve the quality of your keyword research and thus the quality and (perhaps) quantity of your keywords.
The First Question: Relevant keywords
What is it that makes a keyword relevant? What quality is it that you should look for to determine whether or not a keyword is a good keyword to optimize your site for? In order to answer this question it is useful take your customer’s point of view. Remember, your ultimate goal is to attract customers, so obviously it only makes sense to look at things the way that they do.
What terms or phrases do your customers use when they search for your products or services? These terms and phrases are exactly what you are looking for; they are the relevant keywords that you want to target. Why? Because it is when your customers search for these terms or phrases that they are thinking about and interested in your products and searches. That is precisely the moment that you want your site to appear before them. Also, relevant keywords tend to be less competitive and convert better than other, less relevant keywords.
What does a relevant keyword "look" like?
A general rule of is that a relevant keyword is usually a specific term or phrase. For instance, take the word "travel". Someone searching for "travel" maybe interested in "travel guides", "travel insurance", "travel accessories", "travel tours", etc. However, unless you offer all of those services, this keyword is not particularly relevant to your product or services, it is simply too broad a term (it is also, most likely, too competitive a term). On the other hand, Guided European Tours or European Travel Tours are excellent keywords if you offered such services. Less relevant, but more popular, are terms such as European Travel and European Tours.
On the other hand, be wary of being too specific. You don’t want to optimize your site for keywords that none of your potential customers are using. Remember, you want relevant, related keywords that a relatively large number of your potential customers use to search for your products or services. However, there are some extremely specific keywords that you may want to optimize your site for. For instance, model numbers. While oftentimes no one particular model number receives a great deal of search traffic, collectively all of your model numbers may receive quite a bit of
search traffic. What’s more, someone searching for a model number is very interested in your products. As such, it is worth optimizing your site for them.
The Second Question: Your customers motives
In addition to knowing whether or not a keyword is relevant, we also need to discern (when possible) the motives of your (potential) customers when they search for your products or services online? Are they interested in buying your products or services? Are they seeking information? Are they comparing prices? These questions, and others like them, are crucial to ask because they will influence the order in which we optimize our keywords as well as the type of page that we create for each keyword (we will discuss different types of web pages in our Sales Conversion Tutorials).
For instance, the first set of keywords that you want to optimize your site for are those keywords which your customers use when they are actively looking to buy your products or services. For these keywords you will want to create sales pages which are designed to convert your visitors into customers (for more on converting visitors into customers see our Sales Conversion Tutorials). These keywords will, statistically speaking, convert more often to sales for your website than other types of keywords (such as keywords your customers use to gather information). Later on, once you have built and optimized your buying keyword pages, you can build and optimize informational pages so as to attract even more relevant visitors. You can then funnel those visitors to your sales pages wherein you can convert them into customers (for more on funneling your visitors to your sales pages see our Sales Conversion Tutorials). The more precisely you can identify the reasons why your customers are using your keywords the better you will be able to a) prioritize your keywords and b) create pages which relate to those keywords.
In general, keywords can be divided into three categories:
-
Buying keywords
These are the keywords that your customers use when they are actively looking at that moment to purchase your products or services.
-
Research keywords
These are the keywords that your customers use when they are preparing to purchase your product or service at a later time. That later time may be 5 minutes from now, 5 hours, 5 days, or 5 months; the crucial point is that the search is not done with the intention of buying a product or service.
-
Academic keywords
An academic search is a search which is not at all motivated by a desire and/or interest in buying a product or service.
Note, however, that while some keywords can easily be classified into these three categories, other keywords are more ambiguous. Compare, for instance, the following three keywords:
- Buy Canon PowerShot A510
- Canon PowerShot A510 Review
- Digital Camera Tutorial
Each of these keywords can easily be categorized. The first keyword is most likely a buying keyword, the second keyword a research keyword, and the third keyword a academic keyword. However, now note the following keyword:
-
Canon PowerShot A510 Best Price?
Is this a buying keyword or a browsing keyword? That is to say, when your customers use this search term are they looking to buy a Canon PowerShot A510, all they want to know is who has the best price, and once they find that out they will whip out the credit card and make a purchase? Or, alternatively, perhaps they are still researching and are just curious to know what the best price is for the Canon PowerShot A510? Without further information it seems hard to know. However, if you properly track our keywords and how they perform then you may be able to determine how your real life customers actually use your keywords. For instance, if you notice that a particularly high percentage of the people who arrive at your site after searching for this keyword ended up buying that product then you could safely assume that for your customers this is a buying keyword. If, on the other hand, a particularly low percentage of the people who arrived at your site after searching for this keyword ended up buying this product then you would reach the opposite conclusion, namely that this is a research keyword. And, obviously, if the results are somewhere in-between then you would conclude that it is mixed (to learn more about how to track the results of your search optimization campaign see our Web Analytics for SEO Tutorial).
Next tutorial: Keyword Competition
Previous tutorial: Valuable Keywords
This tutorial written by:
Moshe Morris
President of SEMBasics
Chief Research Analyst at Internet Marketing Initiative (www.internetmi.com)
The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book Winning The Search Engine Wars.
To learn more about Search Engine News, click here.
The Basic Keyword Strategy: Part I — Valuable Keywords
The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book Winning The Search Engine Wars.
To learn more about Search Engine News, click here.
The Basic Keyword Strategy
It is not an understatement to say that the success and/or failure of your website lies, in part, on selecting the right keywords (those small, two to five word terms and phrases which your potential customers search for on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN). After all, when we talk about a site ranking well in the search engines what we really mean is that your site ranks well in the search engines for a particular keyword phrase. Choose the right keywords and you can find yourself with top ratings on the search engines and a steady stream of free, targeted traffic. Choose the wrong keywords and you can find yourself wasting your time, money and effort with nothing but a headache to show for it.
The reason why keywords are so important is because they are what connects you with your customers (at least in regards to the search engines). After all, your customers use keywords to try and find your products or services online. Clearly, then, it is worthwhile discovering (and optimizing your site for) those keywords which your customers are using. In order to do that, it is important to have an effective keyword strategy.
An effective keyword strategy involves understanding what it is that we are looking for in a keyword and how to go about finding those keywords. In short, you want to find what we call Valuable Keywords, these are terms and phrases which, when properly optimized for, drive large volumes of targeted traffic to your website. Finding these Valuable Keywords involves using various methods and tools which aide us in building up a large keyword list.
What are Valuable Keywords?
You should note that not all keywords are equally valuable when it comes to optimizing your site for the search engines. Some keywords are more popular, some less so. Some keywords are more competitive, some less so. And so on. Determining the value (or profitability) of a keyword is the key (no pun intended) to determining whether or not it is worth optimizing your site for that keyword. Or, to be more exact, whether or not you should optimize your site for a keyword now, later, or never.
The value of your keywords is determined by answering the following four questions:
- Does the keyword relate to your products or services?
The goal of internet marketing in general, and search engine optimization in particular, is to direct targeted traffic to your website. As such, you need to find those keywords which relate directly to your products or services. For instance, if you are selling home insurance then you don’t want to target the keyword "home" which is too broad for the product that you are selling. Rather, you would want to focus on keywords such as "home insurance quote", "home insurance rate", etc., as they relate directly to the services that you offer.
- Why are your customers searching for any particular keyword?
People have different reasons for searching for particular terms or phrases online. Sometimes they seek information, other times they are browsing, and sometimes they are actively looking to buy a product or service. It is important to prioritize your optimization campaign according to these motivations, first optimization for "buying" keywords and later on optimization for other, related keywords. As such you need to be able to identify and organize your keywords according to the most likely motivation(s) that people have for searching for your keywords.
- How much competition is there for your keywords?
Some keywords are more difficult to optimize for than others. Knowing which keywords you can compete for and which one’s you can’t compete for can often times make the difference between a successful search optimization campaign and a failed one.
- How popular are your keywords?
Not all keywords are as popular among your (potential) customers as others. Obviously, you want to target the most popular, relevant keywords which you can reasonably compete for.
How to find profitable keywords
Asking the above questions is rather easy, finding answers to those questions takes a bit more skill. A strategy that we find helpful, and which we will outline in these tutorials, is to build as large a keyword list as possible and organize that list according to popularity, competitiveness, relevancy and customer motivations. Such a keyword list will prove invaluable as it will help to focus your optimization efforts on those keywords which you have a chance to rank well for and which you want to rank well for. What’s more, this list sets the stage for future optimization campaigns. Once you have successfully optimized your site for a set of relevant keywords, your site is in a better position to compete for more difficult keywords. In other words, as a site builds more quality inbound links and as the search engines start to crawl the site more and more frequently that site builds "search" momentum which it can use to compete for more and more competitive keyword phrases. As such, organizing your keyword list according to the competitiveness of your keywords allows you to map out an effective keyword strategy wherein you are constantly optimizing your site for keywords which you can compete for by progressively tackling more competitiveness keywords.
General Strategy
This, then, is the general strategy that one has to take to build a quality list of relevant keywords. It is now time for the specifics, both of what kind of keywords you are looking for and how to find them. And that is what the following tutorials will explore, the details that go into implementing our keyword strategy.
Next tutorial: Relevant Keywords and Customer Motivation
Previous tutorial: SEO Friendly URLs
This tutorial written by:
Moshe Morris
President of SEMBasics
Chief Research Analyst at Internet Marketing Initiative (www.internetmi.com)
The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book Winning The Search Engine Wars.
To learn more about Search Engine News, click here.