WHAT ARE FOLKS LOOKING FOR?
The Importance of Keyword Research
Keyword research is valuable. It’s the bread of search engine optimization, whereas its application with content is the butter. Successful research and implementation will bring in the most worthy of traffic and help fulfill the user experience. It will also help you explore your content in ways you’ve never thought before, hinting at how you can expand and improve your site. So what’s the process?
Brainstorming
Create an initial list of all keywords and phrases that come to mind and seem relevant to your site’s content and the company’s business model. Really jot them down, as many as you can think of. List the ones already on your site, but also look at competitors’ web pages as well. Find synonyms of these words, with a thesaurus, or through the methodology of human thought, which is ultimately how customers will word their queries.
This last part can be coined part of the “long tail” on the search demand curve, the crucial 70% of all search queries that are worded by humans and don’t necessarily contain the most obvious searched-for keywords.
WE’VE GOT THE TOOLS
Keyword Estimating
Now it’s time to get some numbers. There are plenty of tools out there, between free and costly, that analyze terms and phrases for many factors including search volume estimates, search trends, ad cost estimates, and related terms. While none of these tools are wholly accurate, using a combination of these will help to give you an idea of how keywords compare:
- Google AdWords Keyword Tool Estimator – Free.
- Google AdWords Traffic Estimator – Free.
- Google Trends – great for tracking regional popularity and seasonality of terms. Also free.
- Google Insights for Search – tracks top and rising keywords and has geographical visual aids. Free.
- Overture Keyword Selector Tool – Free.
- WordTracker—varying subscriptions fees.
- Yahoo! Search Marketing – good for brainstorming related keywords. Free.
CUT THE LIST DOWN
Making Decisions
So you’ve come up with a thorough list of terms and phrases, done some research on their popularity, and now it’s time to cut down your list (and add new/expanded terms).
First, determine relevancy. Do the keywords match your business’ mission? Do they tend to answer what your customers asking? What about their relation to your content? If these are all a solid “Yes,” then they are relevant. Keep in mind that less relevant items shouldn’t be entirely discarded since they can act as potential clues of where to aim your marketing efforts next.
Are they also valuable? If they’re relevant, they should increase conversion, but there’s more to this. Target keywords that commence action, such as phrases beginning with “Buy” and “Subscribe”. This is making the advance towards conversion that is much simpler for the user. Also look into which of your pages have the highest abandonment rates and what keywords are leading to those pages – get a sense of why users may be unhappy with their search results.
Conversion is the goal, but keep in mind that it doesn’t just mean people who buy your product. It also equates to people subscribing to your feeds, sharing and publicizing your content, and in general expanding your link presence on the web – all of which can be followed by searches and with tracking code.
With all of this in mind, one needs to remain realistic, and that means knowing your competition. Some keywords are more worth going after than others and it depends on where your site ranks in the grand scale of things. Picking a highly competitive term when you are an unknown site stacked up against several large competitors will probably fail to garner more traffic, however picking relevant but less competitive terms will do more good. Tools like SEOmoz’s Keyword Difficulty Tool can help in this process. It just all depends on the landscape.
Test It Out
The best way to get an impression of what’s to come is to put your research into action by setting up live test campaigns with some of the major search engines’ paid ad programs. It is worth the money to get, for once, accurate projections of your campaign strategy.
