[info]This is the first part of a general keyword research tips series where I’ll be handing over the tools and insight to develop a sound keyword, and ultimately, SEO strategy.[/info]
I’ve won several clients from their incumbent agencies and it never ceases to amaze me how little effort has gone into that initial research into a client’s market – we’re talking about deciding on the direction in which you are facing your entire SEO or inbound marketing efforts (and money!).
Keyword Research is a Strategic Bedrock
It’s so common to see keyword research methods that just don’t cut it. I’ve seen some really awful examples; ranging from a simple dump from Google’s keyword tool with some charts to literally a list of 10 words from Wordtracker Free.
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Keyword research is an absolutely critical starting point for any online marketing strategy.
Poor choices here can lead to a year-long slog for peanuts in ROI because you chose phrases that are too tough for your current link profile; or a laundry list of vanity #1 rankings which have no demand and make no sales.
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What you call things in your business is very rarely what searchers use to find you. I have countless examples of a detailed keyword analysis uncovering rich veins of niche demand – or even new product ideas and branding direction. That’s without mentioning its obvious effect on domain use/choice, URL structures, navigation items, section titles and content strategy.
Experienced analysis of the search demand in your market is invaluable – If all you need is a completely unqualified list of keywords that might be related to your site or business then there really is no need to pay someone hundreds of pounds to tell you that – just go here for free (Google Keyword Tool) or here with your credit card (Wordtracker).
Anyway, onto those reasons:
#1 – Using only one source for suggestions but many for estimation
There really is no rigid rule for collecting keyword ideas – different sources have completely different methods for collecting them. This is one case where I’d happily allow people to add apples to the pear basket.
The more sources for ideas, colloquialisms and potential niches, the better – In addition to the two obvious tools I mentioned above how about the list below to get your right-brain thinking of creative areas for inspiration (click to see all details)?
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[accordion title=”Amazon Top Searches”]A fantastic list of all the current most popular searches, you can even filter by department..[/accordion]
[accordion title=”Waterstones Non-fiction Bestsellers”]Waterstone’s non-fiction bestsellers –
Best-selling books in your industry are a great way to get you thinking about alternative names for your products or services.[/accordion]
[accordion title=”Yahoo Answers”]Yahoo Answers – Good post here – but essentially just search for your topic and see how people are using it, what they’re asking for – also useful for new content ideas.[/accordion]
[accordion title=”Rob’s Awesome Google Suggest Tool”]Rob’s Awesome Google Suggest Tool – great tool here from distilled’s Rob Millard (@rob_millard) to expand your keywords using Google Suggest.[/accordion]
[accordion title=”Wordtracker’s Keyword Questions”]Wordtracker’s Keyword Questions are accessible through their free account – this has some excellent examples to “loosen up” your keyword language and vary the terms you find.[/accordion]
[accordion title=”Tilde Google Searches”]Tilde Google Searches – Set Google to display 100 results (or install Autopagerize) and search Google for: intitle:~your keyword search – this shows a great range of terms that Google is explicitly telling you it considers related – take the hint!
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Once you’ve mined a (preferably huge) list of keyword ideas, then is the time when you must compare like for like – do not use wordtracker and Google for subsets of your data and try to compare them! Just choose one of the leading traffic estimation tools and stick with it – whether the absolute values are spot on is largely irrelevant, it’s just really important that they are being compared relatively.
#2 Ignoring your current site authority
Secondly, if had a pound for every person who just wants to rank for the head term in their industry, I’d have a really cool private jet by now. How much traffic and how many quality links do you already have? I would wager that it’s highly unlikely you can hit the big traffic terms immediately and to do so would be disastrous for your understanding of how effective SEO can be in growing a business.
Heading after the top competition terms may not see any results for many months, even years. Your keyword research should always find a way to distinguish relative difficulty to rank. That way you can easily identify immediate areas to focus on (using on-page SEO to rank for some niche terms for example) and the longer term “trunks” that are contained within that will require more links and authority to start getting any traffic.
For example if you’re in the purple headband business that’s your big money term but it’s super competitive. Based on your current link profile (or PageRank/MozRank/ACRank for quick-and-dirty check) our short term goals may need to terms like “great value purple headband”, “washable purple headband” etc. All of these terms are in the same semantic neighborhood as the high competition term and will be helping you appear relevant for it over the long term but will deliver profitable, converting traffic in the meantime.
Don’t Forget the Salt
It’s worth noting that all these tools have a limited section of the internet on which to base their numbers – I talk about relative search volumes, relative keyword difficulty as that’s all you can really do until you have real data. Once you can accurately map your traffic gains to keyword trunks and themes you’ll only need those volume tools to priorities new targets.
Final Thought
Think of keyword research as the heading or intended course of an aircraft. Ongoing analysis is basically the autopilot, 90% of the time a plane isn’t flying on the true heading, the autopilot is making hundreds of minute adjustments every second to keep the plane on course – remind you of anything?
The next part of this post is coming early next week and goes into a bit more detail on how you might asses your site’s strength and match it to keyword targets.
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