I thought I'd kick things off with a series on the basics of Search Engine Optimization. SEO is one of the most common - and complex - topics I find myself engaged in with clients, and it makes sense to start out with the "building blocks" of every successful web marketing strategy.
Without thorough, accurate keyword research, even the best internet marketing campaign will at best be inefficient. At worst, it will hemorrhage time and money.
Let's take a look at the basic principles of keyword research, starting with a definition:
Keyword: a word or short phrase which captures the essence of the topic being discussed in a particular web page or campaign.
Now, this is where it gets tricky.
There's a huge difference between the keywords YOU think apply to your website and the keywords your potential customers are using in search engine queries. If you simply try to guess, you may be right sometimes, but it would be like playing darts in the dark. Plus, you will be guaranteed to be missing out on other major terms you wouldn't have thought of.
Example:
I was recently reviewing the website of an auto repair shop. The page title read:
"Community Car Repair".
Granted, the owner hadn't put
too much thought into the words, but he felt fairly confident he'd chosen a good phrase. I took 30 seconds to plug a few alternative phrases into Google's keyword tool, and this is what we found:
"Community Car Repair" ended up having the lowest search volume, and "Car Repair" has roughly 1/7th the search volume of "Auto Repair". (PS, for now we're only looking at Global Monthly Search Volume. Local Search Volume is usually unreliable, for a number of reasons we won't go into now).
Clearly, "Community Auto Repair" will bring this auto repair shop more traffic than "Community Car Repair".
But wait: there's more. It's not enough to find the one highest volume term for your industry then pepper your entire site with that single phrase. Focusing on a single phrase, or even two or three phrases, will not only make your site look spamalicious to your potential leads, customers and to Google, but it will cause you to miss out on a host of traffic brought in by longer, more diverse phrases.
Search queries composed of long, complex words and phrases are called "longtail keywords", and they're quickly becoming the Holy Grail of SEO. One of my favorite SEO bloggers, Tim Grice, pounds this point home when he emphasizes that 90% of his organic search traffic comes from longtail keywords, rather than short, 2-3 word keyword phrases.
For example, Tim routinely ranks between #1-#5 on page one of Google for the "shorttail" keyword:
seo consultant
Yet the majority of his traffic comes from longer, more complex search queries such as:
search engine marketing consultant in the UK
how to use link building to improve seo
anchor text best practices for on-page search engine optimisation
We'll tackle using longtail keywords in business blogs to boost search engine traffic in a later post, but it's important to understand the concept of them in order to do effective keyword research.
How do longtail keywords effect keyword research?
Being aware that long, complex phrases are just as crucial - if not more so - as regular high volume keywords causes us to be more alert when performing research. Rather than scanning Google's keyword tool for only the highest volume terms, we need to look for common words and phrases which appear across different queries.
When performing keyword research, I typically segregate keywords into a focus group and a content group. Into the focus group, I toss short, high volume keywords which I'll use to optimize the most crucial areas of a website. Into the content group, I'll toss keywords with lower volume which appear commonly across different phrases, including their most common combinations. When writing content, such as web page content or blog posts, I'll string words from the focus group with relevant phrases from the content group into as many different "longtail" keyword combinations as I can fit.
Using this strategy, I not only capture a more diverse pool of keywords in organic searches, but I help the content sound more natural by using more diverse phrases.
Take the above results from Google's keyword tool, for example. If I were optimizing a set of pages for "high heel shoes", I'd want to take into consideration all the color and style qualifiers which are used in the lower-volume search strings. By combining common descriptive qualifiers with my root keyword, "high heel shoes", and peppering my longtail phrases throughout content and titles, I could triple my search traffic.
Confused yet? Shoot me a question!
Next week we'll take a more in-depth look at how to get the most out of Google's keyword tool.
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