| The Importance Of Keywords |
|
Keyword research is a very important part of your product advertisement campaign. Target the wrong keywords and your customers may never find you, resulting in lost income and insignificant rankings. By targeting the wrong keywords, you not only put valuable advertising at risk, you are also throwing away time and energy you put into your site to begin with. If you want to stay competitive, you can't afford to do that. The keyword research process is broken down into the following chapters: 1 - Dismantle Misinterpretation 2 - Measure twice cut once 3 - The keyword research tools are your friend 4 - Your finale list 5 - Your planned attack 6 - Rinse, Wash Repeat 1 - Dismantle Misinterpretation As different and diverse as a persons product or site is and the individuals running them are, they have one thing in common: they were self-proclaimed keyword research moderator right out of the gate.So they thought. Most common errors about conducting keyword research for your product or site campaign is you already know which terms a customer will use to find your site or product. You don't, without some research at least. You know what you wish to promote is about and how you will find it, but it's hard to anticipate how a possible client would go about finding it. Looking through tunnel vision? You may cause a potential client to not be able to find your product. Remember, your customer doesn't work in the same thought as you do. If they did, they wouldn't need you. When describing your site or product, break away from industry speak. This means do the specific keywords and then you need to broaden the keyword terms or put them in a more laymen term. Other mistakes are generic or "big dollar" terms are the most important for rankings, even if the term you're going after has nothing to do with the product. Think of a clothing store trying to rank for the term "google". Thousands if not millions of searchers probably type that word into their search bar daily, but they're not doing it looking for you. They're looking for "Google". Ranking number one for a term no one will use to get to your site is a waste of time and money. Your site may see a lot of traffic, but customers won't stick around. 2 - Measure twice cut once The process of keyword research is daunting. Coming up with the perfect combination of words to drive customers to you is what you want to do. Bring up your conversion rate and allowing the engines to see you as an expert would easily give anyone a tension headache if the improper keywords are used. Starting slowly is the key. The first is to create a list of potential keywords. Brainstorm all the words you think a customer would type to search when trying to find your product. Including phrases that are broad and targeted, buying and research-oriented, and single and multi-word. What are you hoping to do or promote? Thinking of enough words to cover all the services your product offers. Avoid generic terms like 'shoes' or 'clothes'. These words are incredibly difficult to rank for and won't drive qualified traffic to you. Focus on words that are relevant, and not excessively used. Next step in this part is brainstorming, ask friends, colleagues or past clientele for help. They are able to see your site differently than you yourself see it. And don't be afraid to take a peek at your competitor's Meta Keyword tag. What keywords are they using? How can you expand on their keywords and make yours better? All's fair in search engine rankings. 3 - The keyword research tools are your friend You have a list, the next step is to determine the activity of your recommended keywords. Narrow your list to only include the highly attainable, sought-after phrases that will bring the most qualified traffic to your site.The early days of measuring the "prevalence" of your keyword terms was done by performing a search for each phrase in one of the various engines and seeing how many results it turned up. A very ineffective and tedious method of keyword research. Now there are tools to do the hard part for you. Using a keyword research tool you can quickly learn how many users are conducting searches for that term every day, how many of those searches actually converted, and other important analytical information. It may also tune you in to words you have forgotten or synonyms you weren't aware of or one's you didn't even think of.There are lots of great tools out there to help you determine how much activity your keywords are receiving. Here's a few that are out there to use: Overture Keyword Selector Tool: Overture's Keyword Selector tools shows you how many searches have been conducted over the last month for a particular phrase and lists alternative search terms you haven't thought about. Our only complaint with Overture is that they lump singular and plural word forms into one phrase. For example, "boots" and "boot" would appear under one category of "boot". This can sometimes cause problems. Wordtracker: Wordtracker is a paid-use tool that lets you look up popular keyword phrases to determine their activity and popularity among competitors. Their top 1000 report lists the most frequently searched for terms, while their Competition Search option provides valuable information to determine the competitiveness of each phrase. This is very useful for figuring out how difficult it will be to rank for a given term. It may also highlight hidden gems that have low competition-rates, but high relevancy. Trellian Keyword Discovery tool: This is a fee-based tool where users can ascertain the market share value for a given search term, see how many users search for it daily, identify common spellings and misspellings, and discover which terms are impacted by seasonal trends (mostly useful for PPC). Google AdWords Keyword Tool: Google's keyword PPC tool doesn't provide actual search numbers for keywords. Instead, it displays a colored bar, giving users only an approximation. Still, it may be useful. Google Suggest: Google Suggest is a great way to find synonyms and related word suggestions that may help you expand your original list. Thesaurus.com: Again, another way to locate synonyms you may have forgotten. If you don't like those, The PPC Web Spy is a small plugin that can easily be integrated with Firefox. It's a keyword research tool that lets you know the Google Adwords keywords even as you browse through your competitors' ads. The software is developed by Brad Callen, and allows you to see ppc keywords of the site you are visiting.Keep in mind that you're not only checking to see if enough people are searching for a particular word, you're also trying to determine how competitive that phrase is in terms of rankings. Being comprehensive the competition will tell you how much effort you will need to invest in order to rank well for that term. There are two things to pay attention to when making this decision: how many other sites are competing for the same word and how high are those sites' rankings (i.e. how many other sites link to them, how many pages do they have indexed)? Is this word or phrase worth your time. If it's not, move on.You may want to do a little housekeeping and test the activity for keywords your site is already targeting. Keep the ones that are converting and drop the losers. 4 - Your finale list You have your initial list and have tested them, Time to narrow them down and decide which terms will make it into your coveted final keyword list. Creating a spreadsheet or some other visual will allow you to easily see each word's conversion rate, search volume and competition rate with the tools mentioned above. These figures allow you to calculate how viable that term is for your site and aid you in trying to narrow down your focus. The first step in narrowing down your list is going through and highlighting the terms that closely target the subject and theme of your product. These are the terms you want to keep. Lose all words that are not applicable for your site or that you don't have sufficient content to support. You can't optimize for words that you don't have content for. Create a mix of both broad and targeted keywords. Needing both to rank well. Broad terms are important because they describe what your product does; however, they won't increase the level of qualified traffic coming into your site. Example, you are a company that specializes in work boots. It may be natural for your site to focus on the broad search terms "boots" and "work boots". These words are important because they tell the search engines what you do and may increase your visitors, but the traffic you receive will be largely unqualified. Customers will arrive on your site still unsure of what kind of boots you sell. Do you offer traditional work boots, steel toe boots, toddler boots, or women's work boots? By only targeting broad terms, customers won't know what you offer until they land on your site. A targeted term is often easier to rank and helps bring qualified traffic. They also make you a subject matter expert to the search engines, the targeted terms strengthen the theme created with the broader phrases. Sticking with our example, targeted terms for your work boots site may be "men's work boots", "steel toed work boots", "extra-wide women's work boots", etc. Broad search terms may bring you the higher levels of traffic, but it's targeted, buying-oriented terms like these that will maximize conversions. 5 - Your planned attack Your list of about 10-20 highly focused keywords has been made, now what do you do with them? You prepare them!If you did your research correctly, some if not most of the words on your list already appear in your site content, but a few of them may not. Start thinking about what's needed to support these new words, and how and where your keyword phrases will be used. I would typically recommend going after three or four related keywords per page. Any more than that and you run the risk of diluting your page to the point where you rank for nothing. Make sure to naturally work the keywords into your content and avoid over-repetition that may be interpreted as spamming. Don't make your content sound forced.Your on-page content isn't the only place where you can insert keywords. Keywords should also be used in several other elements on your site: Title Tag, Meta Description Tags, Meta Keywords Tag, Headings, Alt text, Anchor Text/ Navigational Links.A lot of time has been spent finding your keywords; make sure you use them in all the appropriate fields to get the maximum benefit. 6 - Rinse, Wash, Repeat. Congratulations. Your initial keyword research process is behind you. Regrettably, no. As your clientele and your site's needs change over time, so will your keywords. It's important to keep monitoring your keywords and make changes when necessary. Doing so allows you to stay ahead of your competition and keep moving forward. Good luck! About the Author: Make sure you check this excellent free report on usage of keywords to promote your product or web site |