Know-How Exchange : SEO/SEM

Aaron, use your webstats e.g. google analytics to see which words people use and optimize your pages for this words...

Hi Aaron,

the process is relatively straight forward - but with some sites you have to drill down quite deep to discover any meaningful results.

Here are the basic steps:

- Read the text of your website and write down the keywords that you think are relevant to your target audience.

- Go to Google's external keyword tool https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and copy and paste your keywords in the appropriate box. Click 'Get keyword ideas'. Google will now analyze your keyword phrases and match them with key-phrases users actually have searched for. (there is more to do here, but I have to keep it brief.)

- Export the results to excel. Rank them by yearly average search volume.

- You should have some insight in which keywords are relevant to your industry and website, and which are not. Paste the results that you think are irrelevant into another workbook (don't delete for now!).

-Double check your web-analytics package for key phrases that you thought weren't relevant but did still convert and keep those keywords (if you don't have an analytics package, skip this step).

- Now you can research on WordTracker and KeywordDiscovery what the average search volume for these keywords is. These tools are quite often accurate but sometimes not. Because I have to keep things brief here, I will not explain how you can double check accuracy.

- Now you know the most popular keyphrases for your industry. It is time to check how you rank for them (if at all) and note this down in your spreadsheet. The popular keyphrases you rank highest for are those phrases you can improve upon most rapidly.

- If you do not rank well for any keywords, then post another question on the forum or ask me directly. There are some solid strategies out there that can help you rank quickly and build a long-term strategy to rank for some very difficult keywords, but these methods are a bit to involved for 1 forum post...

Hope this helps and good luck!

Aaron,

If you know some of your customers well, and hopefully you do, you can ask them. If they needed to find your product/service again, without knowing the company or product name, what search terms would they use?

A couple tips:
- The more customers you ask the better. Asking five customers who already know your offerings well and who all say the same thing, isn't going to help you reach very far into your target market.
- If you can also ask individuals who are not customers nor prospects yet, but in your target market, that's even better. Your customers already found you. This second group has not so this may give you insight into how to expand your reach.
- You can still use the tools already recommended by others. This will complement that data and give you some additional insights.

Finally, one idea for how to reach a large group of those in your target market. If you attend trade shows, you could have a very simple contest. Those attendees who want to enter are asked to write down on a slip of paper three words or phrases they would use to describe your business. (they may need to listen to your elevator pitch first, but that's not all bad!) Then a drawing is done toward the end of the show.

Good luck to you!

Melissa

Aaron -

If they have some competition that ranks well in search engines you can try a tool called Keyword Spy, www.keywordspy.com. This allows you to enter a URL and shows keywords that are being used for this site.

The warning Mike give above is very appropriate. Be sure that the keywords used are appropriate to the content. You do not just want visitors, but the correct visitors.

Good Luck,
Mike

Hello Aaron

Here's where I would suggest you go if you were my buddy trying to figure this out:

Start with Google's keywords tool (search for it on Google) - it's the best for suggesting additional terms that are actually searched. Try every possible term you can think of that's relevant, and drop them into a single spreadsheet (use the download as CSV option in Google's keywords tool.)

Then, type your competitions' website addresses in using the 'website content' option. Grab all of those keywords and dump them into your spreadsheet too.

Then, if anything resulted from this search that you hadn't though of before, go to Google and conduct a regular search for that term. Type the top 10 websites into the 'website content' tool in Google's keywords tool, and grab all of those keywords too.

Now, you have a great big list. Google doesn't give you search volume, just a scale from 1-10. Not a bad indication of which keywords are worth more, but we want real numbers, right?

Okay, so now go to Google's traffic estimator tool (again, search for it on Google). Drop your keywords into the box and you have a nice list of how many clicks you are likely to get from these terms. If you're looking for keywords for something other than pay-per-click, you can estimate somewhere between 4 and 8 times the number that you'll get from this to be the daily searches at Google. You're getting a great idea of your worthwhile keywords at this point.

NOTE: There are three different ways to estimate traffic through Google's traffic estimator tool - exact match (the typed query has to be exactly the same as your keyword), phrase match (your keywords need to appear in the typed query) or broad match (Google's brain will figure out what's relevant). You'll get a lot less traffic on exact match, the most relevant on phrase match and loads and loads of less targeted traffic on broad match. For planning, use exact match for a conservative estimate and phrase for a fairly realistic estimate.

Also, try www.seobook.com - they have the best keyword research tool, which will cut down a lot of this work for you, but there's a lot to be learned from doing it the long way, and Google is still better at suggesting related terms.

Now, download the Google AdWords Editor (search for it...). Dump your keywords into that (you'll need to create a new draft campaign and follow the instructions to get to the point that you can drop keywords in there, but you'll figure it out). Dump them all into one single campaign and single adgroup. Then, run the keyword grouper tool that's in there and take a look at the results. Ha ha! Epiphany!

By now, you should have a very clear idea of the search volume for each of your terms, tons of additional possibilities, and have them neatly organized into workable groups. Start to assign your own personal value to to them, based on all of this research, and do a search and see how many results come up to get a gut feeling for competition. Figure out what's class A, what's class B, etc., and you now have a model to get to work with and a plan!


If there's anything else I can do to help, or clarify, or if this makes you realize you need a pro (ahem, that's me!), you can find me at www.sterling-advertising.com.

Best of luck,

Claire