For the past few weeks we've received a lot of questions relating to
choosing keywords and phrases. Because of this, we decided to make
this an "all keyphrases, all the time," special issue. Heather will
discuss keywords from a marketing perspective, and I'll talk about
them in terms of your rankings. We've briefly discussed this in past
issues and in some of the articles we've written, so be sure to search
the archives on the Rank Write site, if you would like any additional
information.
- Jill
~~~Heather's Take on Keywords and Your Target Audience~~~
Hello, all!
As Jill mentioned, instead of answering my usual question, I'll be
discussing targeted keyphrases from a search engine writing and
marketing perspective. So, let's hash out what these "keyphrases"
are, anyway, and learn how the heck to work with them.
WHY GIVE A HOOT ABOUT TARGETED KEYPHRASES, ANYWAY?
Because your keyphrases, if chosen correctly, will give you the return
on investment you want. For instance, we have a client who
specializes in surgery for the morbidly obese (otherwise known as
gastric bypass surgery or stomach stapling). When we first checked
out his "old" keyphrases, we found his keyphrases were all over the
map. As an example, two of his keyphrases were:
Shortness of breath when climbing stairs
Joint pain
At first, the keyphrase choices seem logical. After all, aren't
morbidly obese people experiencing joint pains? Could "shortness of
breath" be something so common that it's a hot search term?
Rule #1 of keyphrase research - don't assume a darn thing.
Your keyphrase research comes before everything else - your writing,
your Meta tags, EVERYTHING! For a successful SEO campaign, you need
to find phrases that (a) specifically target what you offer and (b)
are phrases people actually use in a search. If you optimize your
site for the wrong words - or if you *assume* what people surf for,
without some proof - you're almost doomed to fail. That is, if we'd
optimized for "shortness of breath when climbing stairs," we could
have easily gotten the client a killer #1 ranking in the search
engines - but the client wouldn't receive any traffic. Why spend
thousands on an SEO campaign when bad keyphrases guarantee you won't
get found?
BTW - once we found the *right* keyphrases, this client went from 4-5
Internet clients a week to 10-14 a *day*! Not bad for the old bottom
line!
SO, HOW DO I FIND THESE KEYPHRASES?
Don't worry; it's not hard. Your first step is to brainstorm some
keyphrases and then check their popularity. Our "trick of the trade"
is a specialized database called WordTracker, that lets you determine
the popularity of certain words and keyphrases. There are others,
such as GoTo's database, however, we don't feel it is as accurate as
WordTracker. Jill will be discussing more about WordTracker in a
bit.
Some general rules about keyphrase brainstorming are:
1. Use phrases your target audience will understand. Although your
marketing department may argue that "self-directed technology-driven
learning" is a great keyphrase, a simpler version like "online
learning" may be better in the long run. Remember, you want to
create keyword-rich copy around words YOUR audience responds to - not
cool-sounding marketing buzzwords.
2. Don't even think about one-word keyphrases. They ain't gonna work.
One- word keyphrases are typically too competitive to be worth
anything, and you're wasting your efforts.
3. Don't try to trick the engines. Yes, we all know the words "sex"
and "mp3" are highly searched-upon. But don't include these phrases
in your copy unless the words are truly relevant to your content. Not
only will that technique kill your rankings (you won't be #1 for the
phrase "sex," no matter how hard you try) you'll kill your prospect's
experience. After all, who wants to see the word "mp3" included over
and over when what you REALLY want is tire store vendor information?
Your prospects are not stupid - and it's too easy to surf to a
competitor. Why lose a sale as soon as your prospects hit your site?
Heather
~~~Jill's Take on Keyword Selection~~~
As Heather mentioned, we have found WordTracker to be an invaluable
tool for all of our search engine optimization campaigns. I highly
recommend signing up at WordTracker for their paid subscription
(http://our.affiliatetracking.net/wordtracker/af.cgi?28) (Please note
that this is our affiliate link with WordTracker. If you don't want
us to get a small fee if you sign up, feel free to go directly to
www.wordtracker.com instead!) Now, I'm sure the following info on
WordTracker is going to sound like an advertisement for them, however,
I am ONLY endorsing them because I can confidently say that I could
not do my job as well as I do, if it weren't for WordTracker. Anyone
in the search engine optimization field today would be nuts if they
didn't use this program or one like it. If nothing else, it makes
your life easier. I don't know about you, but making my life easier
is always on the top of my to-do list!
What you get with WordTracker, is hard and fast numbers on what
keywords and phrases people are actually searching for in the engines.
Before WordTracker came along, this aspect of a search engine
optimization campaign was purely a guessing game. We had to try and
get into the head of our target audience and guess what they *might*
type into the search engines when looking for a particular product or
service. Sometimes we'd guess right, sometimes not. If we guessed
wrongly, what we'd end up with was what Heather warned about, above:
A terrifically-optimized page that got number one rankings for
keywords that nobody actually plugged into the engines. Fat lotta
good that did the client! For a search engine optimization to be
truly successful, your high rankings MUST be for keywords and phrases
that people really use, and WordTracker gives you this information,
quickly and easily.
Using WordTracker with our current campaigns, we are able to be fairly
certain that we are optimizing for highly searched-upon phrases. The
best way to get started is to do what Heather suggests and first come
up with your own list of relevant words and phrases. Then all you
have to do is plug these into the WordTracker interface, and it will
tell you how many people (if any) are searching for those phrases.
Equally as helpful are the suggestions for related words that
WordTracker will spit out. You may find words that you never would
have thought of on your own. You'll be surprised at some of the
phrases that show up, and often wonder why you didn't think of them!
The database is extremely thorough. Once you've gone through this
exercise (and it doesn't take very long), you simply choose the most
relevant phrases that also get a decent amount of hits, and base your
body copy and tags on these phrases. (Remember, only two to three
related phrases per page.) If you do everything right, you should
have a great shot at increasing the traffic to your site. If you've
also written great marketing copy, then you should be able to keep the
visitors there long enough to make a purchase, sign up for your
newsletter, or download your program!
WordTracker has tons of other features that also may be of use to you.
For instance, once you find some relevant phrases that you'd like to
optimize for, you can check out how competitive they are in the
various engines. That is, WordTracker will show you some "best bets"
based on how many other pages out there are already optimized for
those phrases. So if you find that one phrase you're thinking about
has one million competing pages, but a different phrase only has 200
competitors, you might want to think about choosing the latter. It's
important to note, however, that sometimes I find these competitive
results can vary wildly by engine. If you're trying to optimize for
every engine with the same Web page, this may frustrate you. For
those of you who still believe in creating different pages for
different engines, I would imagine these reports would be invaluable.
WordTracker is constantly being updated and has tons of other features
that I haven't gotten into. I highly recommend that you check it out
for yourself and play around with the features that might be useful to
your business. If you're serious about search engine optimization,
you will not be disappointed!
Jill
~~~Send Us Your Questions~~~
If you have questions about online copywriting or search engine optimization (or both!), just zip us an email to questions@rankwrite.com. We've had some folks ask if their question
was "too basic" to be printed - and you don't have to worry about
that! There are no "stupid" search engine optimization or copywriting
questions, so ask away!
