Richard Goulde Writing

SEO Keyword Research: Introduction

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 | SEM, SEO

In choosing keywords to use in your search engine optimization plan, three basic considerations stand out:

1. Relevance
2. Search Volume
3. Competition

Keyword Relevance

The keyword must be highly relevant to your site. In other words, you want the keywords you use to relate to your products, services or the information your site contains.

Generally, while a one-word keyword (i.e., “books”) may be highly applicable to your site (say, an online retailer of fantasy and science fiction books), its relevance may be low. “Books” is simply too generic. Someone doing a search for that one word may not be looking for a bookseller at all, but instead they may want a library, research resources, critical essays, bibliographies, recommended reading. Or they may want a bookseller but for mysteries instead. Who knows?

Especially if you have a particular niche or specialty – used books, out-of-print books, mystery books – “books” alone is way too broad.

You must always keep your customer in mind. A highly relevant keyword is one your customer will use because they want to find a site just like yours. More pointedly, it’s a term or phrase they’ll use because they want to find a site that offers the exact same service as yours – they want to buy whatever kind of books you sell.

A good keyword drives targeted traffic. You can have massive traffic to your site without any conversion. Conversion is when a visitor takes the action you want them to take. If you’re a business, you may want visitors to buy your product via your online store, or you might want them to call a salesperson for a consultation. If you’re a nonprofit, you might want people to donate money, or to take some kind of action you advocate, like writing to a politician. If you’re an information resource, maybe you want your audience to post a comment, contribute their own article, subscribe via email or an RSS feed, or simply come back a second time. If visitors don’t do what you want them to do, they have not “converted.”

The traffic driven to your site by highly relevant keywords are more likely to take the action you’d like, than random traffic generated by a generic keyword search.

Keyword Search Volume

The ideal keyword is a term or phrase that lots of people use to search online. That means a lot of potential traffic for your site. By contrast, a keyword with low search frequency means not many people actually use that keyword in searches. If no one uses the keyword when searching, even if it’s highly relevant, no one will find your site.

But! Popularity does not equal appropriateness. Yes, we want keywords for which people are actually searching, but more importantly we want visitors to your site to convert, to take the action you want them to take. In the example we’re using, we want them to buy a book from you. Someone searching for “fantasy books” may want to read reviews or find a list of recommendations or join a forum where they can discuss their favorites, rather than actually buy a book. Therefore, a more detailed search phrase like “used fantasy books shop” may have less search volume, but it’s more likely to yield buying customers.

So, it comes back to your clientele. It’s not just what they’re looking for, it’s also their intent in looking for it. If you’re selling, but your keyword doesn’t attract traffic that’s buying, the keyword does you no good. So remember that popularity is only one consideration in choosing a keyword.

Keyword Competition

In contrast to relevance and search frequency, ideally competition for a keyword will be low. In this case, we’re not talking about business competition per se, but competing web sites that employ the same keyword. Lower competition means there are fewer websites using that keyword, and that those websites are not well optimized for it, which makes it easier for your site to achieve a higher ranking in search results.

This is also known as keyword difficulty, or how hard it will be for your web page to rank for that particular keyword.

Competition is another reason one-word keywords are not useful for most sites. The competition for a single word can be impossibly intense. Only if you are lucky enough to be a super-authority on the subject of your website (perhaps a government body like the IRS, or multinational conglomerate like IBM), might you be able to rank high in search results even with a one-word search.

As you can imagine, search frequency and competition are usually correlated.

Keyword Research Tips

Some tips before we begin the serious keyword research:

• The ideal keyword is highly relevant (targeted), highly popular (lots of search volume) but not very competitive (fewer sites using that keyword, and those sites not well optimized for it).
• Your customers or readers are the foundation of all of this. Everything we do needs to center around their needs and why they would want to come to your site. Try to see through their eyes.
• When I say “keyword,” I include multiple-word phrases as well as single words.
• The ideal keyword is between 2 to 5 words in length. That ensures the keyword is sufficiently targeted and highly relevant. Exceptions might include your name, proprietary products or services (especially if you hold any trademarks or patents) and unique acronyms.
• We want no more than 2 to 3 keywords per page. It’s next to impossible to optimize for more than that. The search engines frown on the practice, and it’s hard to incorporate that many keywords into the text and coding.
• Start to think of your site in terms of landing pages. A landing page is the page a visitor finds by doing a web search. The landing page isn’t necessarily your home page. Someone might search for a particular product, for example, and Google might return the page you’ve dedicated to that product rather than your home page. At the same time, not every page will be a landing page. Don’t worry as much about keywords for non-landing pages.
• Each page of your website should have different keywords, if possible. Sometimes it may be unavoidable, but when you use the same keywords for different pages, you force the search engines to choose between those pages whenever someone searches for that keyword. How can the search engine know which page is more relevant to the search if two pages are equally optimized for the same search term? In the end, both pages in your site will suffer in the rankings. This is called keyword cannibalization, and I’ll talk about it more in my up-coming Content Optimization series.
• Try to tackle this research on a per-page basis, instead of doing the whole site all at once. In fact, frequently the research will reveal that you’re trying to optimize a single page for too many different kinds of keywords, and you may realize you need new pages.

Hopefully by now you have a solid (if perhaps basic) understanding of keywords, as well as the qualities of a good keyword.

Next up: roll up our sleeves and plow into the real work by building an initial keyword list to research.

Richard Goulde is a professional writer and SEO who combines compelling copy with Internet savvy -- sales, educational, PR and creative. He's based in Dallas but his words go global, so whether you're in Peoria or Paris, contact him to talk about how his work can serve your business needs.

Tags: Keyword Research, Keywords

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