Welcome to the first post in a series on do-it-yourself search engine marketing (DIY SEM).
Keyword research is the most important part of good website marketing. Targeting the wrong keywords will cause you to lose valuable time, not to mention crucial sales.
Even though you think you know your products better than anyone else, you don’t always know the lingo people are using to find those products. Remember, what may be common to you, especially when using slang or industry specific terms, may not be what your general viewing audience uses. Don’t take for granted that you know what keyword terms people are using - spend a little money and buy a subscription to a keyword analytics tool. Most professionals in the marketing industry rely on a program called, Wordtracker.
Once you have your keyword analytics program, you are ready to begin the process of Keyword Discovery.
First thing you want to do is spend a little time on your website looking over the products and services you offer. Then, take a few of the product/service names or common words used to describe them and enter them in the keyword analysis tool you purchased. Depending on the quality of the tool, you will have the ability to see if those terms are actually searched on using Google, AOL, MSN, Yahoo, etc. but more importantly, you will be able to see the following:
- Estimated daily searches
- Keyword data with and without plural versions
- Exact match keyword data (keyword entered exactly as you want)
- Keyword variation data (keyword that may include additional terms or variations)
- Predicted daily searches for the coming months
Once you have determined the keyword terms that you feel are appropriate for your site, ask yourself, “Self, do I have enough content on my site to support all of the keyword terms I have chosen?”. If the answer is “I think so” or “I don’t know”, then you probably don’t know what the general rule of thumb is for keyword usage.
My personal “keyword selection rule of thumb”, which by the way has not failed me yet, is to choose one keyword term or keyword phrase for each page that I have on my site. I don’t generally focus a keyword term to the contact page or about us page but product service pages get the full treatment. So, does this mean that you can only target one phrase per page? No, if you are clever enough, you can get two or three variations included as well - see example below.
Example:
I have a product page dedicated to selling Gourmet Coffee from around the world. My obvious keyword term is “gourmet coffee” but I also know that my coffee is organic, fair trade and shade grown. So, if my keyword research showed that those other terms are used in conjunction with “coffee” products searches, I could create a title that to that page that read something like this, “Organic Shade Grown Fair Trade Gourmet Coffee”. It may be a bit of a mouthful but know I have the following keyword terms that I can get rankings for without looking like I am stuffing my page with keywords:
- organic coffee
- shade grown coffee
- fair trade coffee
- gourmet coffee
- shade grown organic coffee
So, select the keyword terms you want but don’t over-do-it on the product/service page unless you can incorporate multiple keywords like I did above.
The next thing you need to do before settling on the keyword terms is check the competition for each term. The Wordtracker tool I mentioned above has a tool for that but I prefer to go straight to the horses mouth - Google. I take each keyword term, type it into Google and click the search. If you see that there are several million to several hundred million other sites competing for that keyword term, you may want to pick another instead. For sure you don’t have to but the more competitive your terms, the longer it will take to get top search listings.
Once you are satisfied with the terms you chose, put them into a spreadsheet with the estimated daily searches. Be sure to date the spreadsheet because you need to come back in about 3 months and run the keyword analysis tool for those terms again. You do this simply to verify that the terms you chose were not just a ‘fad’ term - you want to make sure it still produces decent traffic.
Well, that is about it - you have mastered the art of choosing proper keyword terms. Actually, there is no way to master keyword selection - just when you think you have nailed down the best term(s), you find something that looks better. The key here is to find terms you are comfortable with, produce good traffic and have a low amount of competing sites, then stick with that term for a minimum of 4 to 6 months. You want to be able to see the fruit of your work and changing keyword terms too quickly won’t give the search engines adequate time to rank your terms.
Just one more thought - don’t trust your keyword analysis to just anyone if you can’t do it yourself. A lot of SEO/SEM firms don’t really care about getting you keyword terms that return great traffic and even better conversions, they just want to get terms that they know they can get rankings for (something non-competitive/non-preforming). Even then, don’t always trust yourself either - it never hurts to get a second opinion.
A little extra time spent upfront will save you months of wasted time down the road.
it?
