Keyword Research and Analysis

from Davin Ogden- SEO Strategist

Performing keyword research and analysis by selecting the best phrases for a better search engine placement.

Search engines have been the vehicles that drive potential customers to your websites. But in order for visitors to reach their destination - your website - you need to provide them specific and effective signs that will direct them properly to your site. You do this by creating specifically asked for keywords.

Think of the "right keywords" as the backbone, of the internet.  Find the exact proper words or phrases, and "Hell yeah!",  hoards of traffic will be pulling up to your front door. But if your keywords have been too general or too over-used, the possibility of visitors actually making it to your site - or of seeing any legit profits from the visitors that do arrive - decreases dramatically.

Your keywords serve as the foundation of your marketing strategy. If they are not chosen with great precision, no matter how aggressive your SEO campaign management might be, the proper people may never get the chance to find out about it.  So your first step in devising your strategy is to gather and evaluate keywords and phrases.

You probably imagine you already know exactly the right words for your search phrases. But in reality, if you haven't followed certain specific steps, you have may have been driven in the wrong direction. It's hard to be objective when you are right in the center of your business network, which is the reason this you may not be able to choose the proper keywords from the inside. You need to be able to think like your customers, and perform a proper analysis of keywords.

And since you have been a business owner and not the consumer, your best bet is to go without delay to the source.  Instead of plunging in and scribbling down a bunch of potential search words and phrases on your own, ask for words from as many potential customers as you can. You will most likely assess that your understanding of your business and your customers' understanding is significantly different.

The consumer is an unbelievable resource.  The words you accumulate from them have been words and phrases you wouldn't even of thought of from deep inside the trenches of your business.  Only after you have molded as many words and phrases from outside resources should you add your own keywords to the list. Once you have this bunch in hand, you will be ready for the next step: evaluation.

How to earn $2 for every $1 you spend on advertising.

The ultimate aim of evaluation is to narrow down your list to a small number of words and phrases that will direct the highest number of quality visitors to your website. By "quality visitors" I mean those consumers who are most likely to make a purchase rather than just cruise around your site and take off for something different, or in their minds, better. In evaluating the effectiveness of keywords, recognize three elements: popularity, specificity, and willingness. 

Popularity is the easiest to equate because it is an objective quality. The more current your keyword is, the more likely the probability is this it will be typed into a search engine which will give you a chance of better search engine placement.

You can now buy software that will rate the popular regard of keywords and phrases by giving words a number rating based on current search engine activity. Applications such as WordTracker will even suggest variations of your words and phrases. The higher the number that software assigns to a given keyword, the more traffic you can logically expect to be directed to your site. The only bad case with this concept is the more widely known the keyword is, the greater the search engine position you will need to obtain. If you are
down at the bottom of the search results, the consumer will no doubt never scroll down to check you out.

Popularity isn't enough to declare a keyword a great choice.  You must move on to the next criteria, which is specificity. The more specific your keyword is, the greater the likelihood that the consumer who is ready to buy your goods or services will find you.

Let's look at a hypothetical example. Imagine that you have received popularity rankings for the keyword "drum companies."  However, your company specializes in snare drums only. The keyword "snare drum companies" would rank lower on the popularity scale than "drum companies," but it would nevertheless serve you much better. Instead of getting a slew of folks interested in everything from buying drum hardware to changing their timbale drum heads, you will get only those consumers interested in snare drums, tuning of snare drums etc..  In other words, consumers ready to buy your product or services are the ones who will access you. Not only that, but the greater the specificity of your keyword is, the less competition you will have to deal with.

Be #1 on Google and Yahoo!

The third element is consumer willingness. Once again, this requires putting yourself inside the mind of the customer rather than the seller to figure out what motivation prompts a person requesting a service or product to type in a particular word or phrase. Let's look at one more example, such as a consumer who is searching for a job as an IT manager in a new city. If you have to choose between "Vancouver job listings" and "Vancouver IT recruiters" which do you think will interest the consumer more? If you were requesting that type of specific job, which keyword would you type in? The second one, of course! Using the second keyword targets people who have decided on their career, have the necessary skills, and are ready to get that job , rather than someone just out of school who is casually trying to figure out what to do with his or her life in between beer parties. You want to attack people who are ready to act or make a purchase, and this requires subtle tinkering of your keywords until your find the most specific and immediately targeted phrases to take the
most motivated traffic to you site.

Once you have figured out your keywords, your work is not done. You must every so often evaluate performance across a variety of search engines, bearing in mind that times and trends change, as does current lingo. You cannot rely on your log traffic analysis alone because it will not tell you how many of your visitors actually created a buy.

Luckily, some new tools such as IBP were invented to help you judge the effectiveness of your keywords in individual search engines. IBP analyzes consumer behavior in relation to consumer traffic. This allows you to discern which keywords are bringing you the most valuable customers.  That is an essential concept: numbers alone do not make a credible keyword; profits per visitor do. You need to attack keywords that direct consumers to your site who actually buy your product, fill out your forms, or download your
product. That is the most central determiner in evaluating the efficiency of a keyword or phrase, and should be the the gun in your hand when discarding and replacing ineffective or inefficient keywords with keywords which take in better profits.

Ongoing analysis of tested and proven keywords is the trick to search engine success. This may sound like a lot of work and it is!  You could go out and hire a search engine optimization service, and pay thousands of dollars for this type of service, but I'm here to tell you, with IBP's software this just isn't necessary.  IBP will be and can be your greatest ally in catapulting you to the top with search engine success.  IBP and the amount of informed effort you put into your keyword research  and SEO campaign is what will generate your greatest rewards.

In the next page, let's talk a little about Organic SEO

Keyword Density

Keyword Bidding