How
to Choose the Right Keywords for Your Site
Many businesses
recognize that search engines can bring volumes of highly targeted
prospects to their website, typically at a fraction of the cost
of traditional marketing.
Unfortunately, these same companies often overlook the most
important part of their search engine marketing campaigns, which
is keyphrase selection and evaluation.
Keyphrases
(those phrases that potential customers are using to find products
or services on search engines) are the building block of any
search engine marketing strategy.
It is essential
that they are chosen carefully, or else the remainder of the
campaign, no matter how effective the implementation, will likely
be in vain. What follows is a three-step process that goes over
the process of compiling, selecting, and evaluating the ongoing
performance of keyphrases for search engines.
1.
Compiling a keyphrase list
Usually,
companies are sure that they already know their ideal keyphrases.
Often, they are wrong.
This is
typically because it is very hard to separate oneself from a
business and look at it from the perspective of a potential
customer (rather than an insider). Compiling a keyphrase list
should not be, despite common practice, a strictly internal
process.
Rather,
it is best to ask everyone outside of your company for their
input, especially your customers. People are often very surprised
at the keyphrase suggestions they get- and sometimes dismayed
to realize that an average customer doesn’t speak the
same language that they do.
Only after
you have put together a list of likely phrases from external
sources do you add your own. As a last step, try to add variations,
plurals, and derivatives of the phrases on your list.
2.
Evaluating keyphrases
Once you
have compiled a master keyphrase list, it is time to evaluate
each phrase to hone your list down to those most likely to bring
you the highest amount of quality traffic.
Although
many individuals will base their assessment of keyphrase value
based only on popularity figures, there are really three vitally
important aspects of each phrase to consider.
a)
Popularity
By far
the easiest of the three to judge is popularity, since it is
not subjective. Software like WordTracker
gives popularity figures of search phrases based upon actual
search engine activity (it also gives additional keyphrase suggestions
and variations).
Such tools
allow you to assign a concrete popularity number to each phrase
to use when comparing them. Obviously, the higher the number,
the more traffic that can be expected (assuming you are able
to obtain good search engine positions).
However,
this number alone is not good enough reason to pursue any particular
keyphrase, although keyphrase analysis too often stops here.
b)
Specificity
This is
more abstract than the sheer popularity number, but equally
important. For example, let’s assume that you were able
to obtain great rankings for the keyphrase "insurance companies"
(a daunting prospect). Let’s also assume that you only
deal with auto insurance.
Although
"insurance companies" might have a much higher popularity
figure than "auto insurance companies", the first
keyphrase would also be comprised of people looking for life
insurance, health insurance, and home insurance.
It is very
likely that someone searching for a particular type of insurance
will refine their search after seeing the disparate results
returned from the phrase "insurance companies".
In the
second, longer keyphrase, you can be reasonably sure that a
much higher percentage of visitors will be looking for what
you offer- and the addition of the word "auto" will
make it much easier to attain higher rankings, since the longer
term will be less competitive.
c)
Motivation of User
This factor,
even more abstract than specificity, calls for an attempt to
understand the motivation of a search engine user by simply
analyzing his or her search phrase.
Assume,
for example, that you were a real estate agent in Atlanta. Two
of the keyphrases you are evaluating are "Atlanta real
estate listings" and "Atlanta real estate agents".
Both phrases
have very similar popularity numbers. They are also each fairly
specific, and your services are very relevant to each. So which
phrase is better? If you look into the likely motivation of
the user, you will probably conclude that the second is superior.
While both
phrases target people looking for real estate in Atlanta, you
can infer from the second phrase that the searcher has moved
beyond the point where they are browsing local homes or checking
out prices in their neighborhood- they are looking for an agent,
which implies that they are ready to act. Often, subtle distinctions
between terms can make a large difference on the quality of
the traffic they attract.
3.
Evaluating Keyphrase Performance
Until recently,
judging the performance of individual keyphrases was a dicey
proposition. Although it is possible to tell from your log traffic
analysis how many visitors are getting to your site from each
keyphrase (valuable information, but unfortunately not enough
to do much with), it was very hard to decipher which phrases
were bringing you the most quality traffic.
Recently,
however, some sophisticated but affordable tools have been developed
that allow you to judge the performance of each individual keyphrase
based upon visitor behavior.
This new
software makes it possible to periodically analyze which keyphrases
are bringing your site the most valuable visitors- those who
buy your products, fill out your contact form, download your
demo, etc.
This type
of data, rather than the sheer number of visitors from each
search phrase alone, is invaluable when you are refining your
search engine marketing campaigns, since you can discard and
replace non-performing keyphrases and put increased effort toward
the phrases that are delivering visitors that become customers.
This kind
of ongoing analysis is the final piece of the keyphrase puzzle,
and allows you to continually target the most important phrases
for your industry, even if they change over time.
Conclusion
Keyphrase
compilation, evaluation, and performance are all vitally important
to any search engine marketing campaign. While high rankings
in search engines are an admirable goal, high rankings for poor
keyphrases will consistently deliver poor results.
Integration
of this keyphrase process into your overall search engine marketing
strategy can dramatically improve your website performance (and
thus your bottom line).
Article
by:
Scott Buresh, Medium
Blue Internet Marketing
Related article: "Finding
relevant keywords with Google" (published in the Search
Engine Facts newsletter #18).
"Copyright by Axandra.com. Internet
marketing and search engine ranking software."
