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Five Steps to Effective Keyword Research
By Lisa Barone (c) 2007

There's no getting around it. Keyword research is a vitally
important aspect of your search engine optimization campaign. If
your site is targeting the wrong keywords, the search engines
and your customers may never find you, resulting in lost dollars
and meaningless rankings. By targeting the wrong keywords, you
not only put valuable advertising dollars at risk, you are also
throwing away all the time and energy you put into getting your
site to rank for those terms to begin with. If you want to stay
competitive, you can't afford to do that.

The keyword research process can be broken down into the
following phases:

Phase 0 - Demolishing Misconceptions
Phase 1 – Creating the list and checking it twice
Phase 2 – Befriending the keyword research tool
Phase 3 – Finalizing your list
Phase 4 – Plan your Attack
Phase 5 - Rinse, Wash Repeat
Phase 0 - Demolishing Misconceptions

Over the years, we've had the opportunity to work with a wide
array of wonderful clients. And as different and diverse as
their sites and the individuals running them may have been, many
had one thing in common: they were self-proclaimed keyword
research mavens right out of the gate.

Or so they thought.

One of the most common misconceptions about conducting keyword
research for a search engine optimization campaign is the belief
that you already know which terms a customer would use to find
your site. You don't. Not without first doing some research
anyway. You may know what your site is about and how you, the
site owner, would find it, but it's difficult to predict how a
paying customer would go about looking for it.

This is due to site owners evaluating their site through too
narrow of a lens, causing them to come up with words that read
like industry jargon, not viable keywords. Remember, your
customer probably doesn't work in the same industry that you
do. If they did, they wouldn't need you. When describing your
site or product, break away from industry speak. Your customers
aren't searching that way and if you center your site on these
terms, they'll never find you.

Another misconception is that generic or "big dollar" terms
are the most important for rankings, even if the term you're
going after has nothing to do with your site. Imagine a women's
clothing store trying to rank for the term "google". Sure,
thousands 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. Being ranked number one for a term no one
would associate with your site is a waste of time and money (and
it may get you in trouble!). Your site may see a lot of traffic,
but customers won't stick around.

Phase 1 – Creating the list and checking it twice

The initial idea of keyword research can be daunting. Trying to
come up with the perfect combination of words to drive customers
to your site, rev up your conversion rate and allow the engines
to see you as an expert would easily give anyone a tension
headache.

The trick is to start slowly.

The first step in this process is to create a list of potential
keywords. Brainstorm all the words you think a customer would
type into their search box when trying to find you. This
includes thinking of phrases that are broad and targeted, buying
and research-oriented, and single and multi-word. What is your
site hoping to do or promote? Come up with enough words to cover
all the services your site offers. Avoid overly generic terms
like 'shoes' or 'clothes'. These words are incredibly
difficult to rank for and won't drive qualified traffic to your
site. Focus on words that are relevant, but not overly used.

If you need help brainstorming ideas, ask friends, colleagues or
past customers for help. Sometimes they are able to see your
site differently than the way you yourself see it. Also, don't
be afraid to take a peek at your competitor's Meta Keyword tag.
What words are they targeting? How can you expand on their
keyword list to make yours better? It's okay to get a little
sneaky here. All's fair in love and search engine rankings.

Phase 2 – Befriend the keyword research tool

Now that you have your list, your next step is to determine the
activity for each of your proposed keywords. You want to narrow
your list to only include highly attainable, sought-after
phrases that will bring the most qualified traffic to your
site.

In the early days of SEO, measuring the "popularity" of your
search terms was done by performing a search for that phrase in
one of the various engines and seeing how many results it turned
up. As you can imagine, this was a tedious and ineffective
method of keyword research. Luckily, times have changed and we
now have tools to do the hard part for us.

By inputting your proposed keywords into 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 had previously forgotten or
synonyms you weren't aware of.

There are lots of great tools out there to help you determine
how much activity your keywords are receiving. Here's a few of
our personal favorites:

Overture Keyword Selector Tool
(http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/):
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 may have forgotten 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 (http://www.wordtracker.com/): 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 (http://www.trellian.com/): 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
(https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal):
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 (http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en):
Google Suggest is a great way to find synonyms and related word
suggestions that may help you expand your original list.

Thesaurus.com (http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en):
Again, another way to locate synonyms you may have forgotten.

If those don't tickle your fancy, we'd also suggest Bruce
Clay's Check Traffic tool (http://www.seotoolset.com/cgi-bin/
checktraffic.cgi), which estimates the number of queries per day
for that search term across the major search engines.

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.

Understanding the competition tells 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 strong
are those sites' rankings (i.e. how many other sites link to
them, how many pages do they have indexed)? Basically, is that
word or phrase even worth your time? If it's not, move on.

While you're testing your new terms, 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.

Phase 3 – Finalizing your list

Now that you have your initial list of words and have tested
their activity, it's time to narrow down the field and decide
which terms will make it into your coveted final keyword list.

We recommend creating a spreadsheet or some other visual that
will allow you to easily see each word's conversion rate,
search volume and competition rate (as given to you by the tools
mentioned above). These three figures will allow you to
calculate how viable that term is for your site and will be a
great aid as you try and narrow down your focus.

The first step in narrowing down your list is to go through and
highlight the terms that most closely target the subject and
theme of your web site. These are the terms you want to hold on
to. Kill all words that are not relevant to your site or that
you don't have sufficient content to support (unless you're
willing to write some). You can't optimize for words that you
don't have content for.

Create a mix of both broad and targeted keywords. You'll need
both to rank well. Broad terms are important because they
describe what your web site does; however, they won't increase
the level of qualified traffic coming into your site.

For example, say you are a company that specializes in cowboy
boots. It may be natural for your site to focus on the broad
search terms "boots" and "cowboy 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
cowboy boots, stiletto cowboy boots, toddler cowboy boots, suede
cowboy boots or women's cowboy boots? By only targeting broad
terms, customers won't know what you offer until they land on
your site.

Targeted terms are often easier to rank for and help bring
qualified traffic. They also make you a subject matter expert to
the search engines, since the targeted terms strengthen the
theme created with the broader phrases. Sticking with our
example, targeted terms for your cowboy boots site may be
"men's cowboy boots", "blue suede cowboy boots",
"extra-wide women's cowboy 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.

Phase 4 – Plan your attack

So you made your list of about 10-20 highly focused keywords,
now what do you do with them? You prepare them for launch!

Chances are, if you did your keyword research right, at least
some of the words on your list already appear in your site
content, but some of them may not. Start thinking about how many
pages you'll need to create to support these new words, and how
and where your keyword phrases will be used.

We typically recommend only going after three or four related
keywords per page (five if you can balance them properly). 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. Your content should never 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

You've spent a lot of time molding your keywords; make sure you
use them in all the appropriate fields to get the maximum
benefit.

Phase 5 - Rinse, Wash Repeat.

Congratulations. Your initial keyword research process is behind
you. You've created your list, checked it twice, made friends
with the keyword research tools and are now off to go plan your
attack. You're done, right?

Unfortunately, no. As your customer's and your site's needs
change over time, so will your keywords. It's important to keep
monitoring your keywords and make tweaks as necessary. Doing so
will allow you to stay ahead of your competition and keep moving
forward.

Good luck!
================================================================
Lisa Barone (lbarone@bruceclay.com) is a senior writer at Bruce
Clay, Inc. (http://www.bruceclay.com)
================================================================

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