Get SEO Right ... Research Your Keywords
You Can't Optimize Without a Target
Imagine practicing for months to shoot an NBA 3-pointer? You build up your leg strength, practice catching and shooting and how to set your feet. Then comes game time ... and you fire nothin' but air balls because you practiced on an 8-foot hoop instead of a 10-foot rim.
Well that's like optimizing your site for search without deciding what keywords you want to rank for. And don't say I want to rank for "all of them" 'cause it ain't happenin'.
Let's assume you're PetSmart.com and you have a new line of dog toys, specifically a new series of rubber kongs. You've got to pick the best keyword phrases to optimize for that will deliver people to the door step of this new product. How do you pick those keywords?
First, you'd go to Google's Keyword Tool and search the term that is most central to the focus of that index page. In this case I used "dog toys" and it delivered that and a slew of related terms.
So then I researched how the site performed for each of those keywords noting the term, search volume for that term, its Google rank, and the number of results served for that search term, or your competing pages. The terms and search volume are provided via Google's keyword tool. The rank and competing pages are revealed by simply doing a Google search for that term and noting where your site falls in the results. Count back to the No.1 result for your rank. The competing pages are listed in the upper right as the total number of results. That's your competition.
Keyword | Seach Vol. | Rank | Competition
"dog toy" | 368,000 | #83 | 22.7M
"dog toys" | 301,000 | #9 | 37.8M
"dogs toy" | 74,000 | 100+ | 10.7M "dogs toys" | 60,500 | #80 | 20.0M "plush dog toy" | 33,100 | #74 | 706K "toys for dogs" | 18,100 | 100+ | 21.3M "kong dog toy" | 14,800 | #3 | 467K "kong dog toys" | 9,900 | #3 | 795K "rubber dog toy" | 8,100 | #8 | 391K
"stuffed dog toy" | 6,600 | 100+ | 706K "stuffed dog toys" | 6,600 | 100+ | 816K
Next, consult your local analytics like Omniture, Webtrends, etc. If you're not tracking your site with analytics, you can set up a free Google Analytics account. These programs will tell you how many people visited your site via search AND what keywords they searched to get there. These keywords should be considered when choosing your targets, because they are already working for you to some degree.
Now, based on those results we can get a good idea of what terms are critical for us. Keep in mind you want to optimize for terms that will put you on Page 1 (top 10 results) for Google. Approximately 68% of searchers don't click results beyond Page 1, so you've got to be there. If you're already there, moving up above the fold (top 3 to 5 links) can increase traffic 3x to 4x, according to marketingexperiments.com.
Look for terms that:
+ Are focused on your goal and content for that index
+ Has a decent amount of search traffic. Don't be turned off by smaller search totals that are highly focused on your content. Ten thousand people looking for rubber dog toys can be more valuable than 100,000 people looking for dog supplies.
+ Gives you a fighting chance to rank on Page 1. Preferably it's a term you are showing at least some limited success with now -- a rank within the first four pages or top 40 results.
Based on that and my goal to optimize for a new line of rubber dog kongs -- I'd focus on "kong dog toy (s)" and "rubber dog toy" for those index pages. As part of my general SEO for the site, I would focus on driving the rank for "dog toy" from a low Page 1 to a top-3 result on Page 1 across all the site pages.
With those terms set as my targets -- I would then move on to optimization techniques to improve the rank of those pages. And I'll cover those in upcoming posts.
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