Search Engine Optimization:
How To Figure Out What Keywords You Should Be Buying
OK I know what you're thinking. You buy keywords for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, not organic SEO. The search engines are not accepting "bribes" for keyword placement!
Of course you're right. But if you want to understand how to choose which keywords to optimize, it will make the most sense if you think of it as buying them. That is because the primary consideration when choosing keywords is ROI (return on investment).
The effort required to get high rankings for a keyword is directly proportional to how competitive the keyword is. Therefore the "cost" to "buy" a keyword is partly determined by the number of other websites that are competing for it.
The main thing that will determine how much a keyword "costs" is the top ten ranking sites. If those sites are winning their high rankings with just a few pages and a few incoming links then it's a "cheap" keyword. But they may be competing at the level of hundreds of pages and thousands (even tens of thousands) of incoming links. That would be a very expensive keyword because you will need to have hundreds of pages developed and acquire thousands of incoming links if you want top ten ranking for that keyword.
Knowing how much a keyword "costs" is just half of the equation. The other half is knowing how much traffic the keyword will bring you if you do make it to the top ten. But how can you find out how frequently people search for a keyword?
A rule of thumb is that the less competition for a keyword the less traffic it will bring you because not many people search for it. Still, you need to have some way of predicting traffic or else you're just shooting in the dark.
There are two ways to predict the traffic a keyword will bring you. The first (and most common) method is to get indications about search volumes by using industry standard keyword research tools such as Overture and WordTracker. The downside of this method will become evident if you go looking for information about these tools. You will find articles that criticize each one for having skewed, unreliable data. In fact, experience bears this out when actual traffic is measured. However, this somewhat flawed data is definitely better than no data at all!
If you want to be 100% certain which keywords get searched on the most, you'll want to use the second method. Set up a Google Adwords (pay-per-click) campaign and have it tie into web analytics that will show you exactly what words were typed into the search engine. Start out by setting your keywords to "broad match" which means that a variety of keywords will trigger your ad.
For example if you apply broad match to the keyword "selling business" your ad will show up when people search for the following (and many, many more) keywords:
- selling your business
- sell your business
- sell my business
- business to sell
- broker to sell my business
Your web analytics report will track each and every different specific search term that resulted in a click on your ad for the broad match keyword (e.g., "selling business"). From that you will observe for yourself what the most popular search terms really are!
Now that you know how to pick the right keywords out of a group of keywords you are considering, you may want to know how to come up with keywords to consider in the first place.
- Make a list of all the keywords you think people might find you with
- Ask your customers to make a list of all the keywords they would try to find you with
- Once you start doing keyword research on the list you have, the research tools will make additional suggestions. Get keyword suggestions from the Overture tool, WordTracker and your Google AdWords PPC campaign.
Your overall search engine optimization strategy will be determined by the picture that emerges from your research. Given a list of attractive keywords, SEO strategy is quite different from pay-per-click (PPC) strategy. With PPC you have a specific cost per click. The result is immediate, but traffic stops when you stop paying.
With SEO, the work you have done now will produce results for years to come, so the cost is amortized over time. Furthermore, SEO is most effective when undertaken as a long-term strategy. Start by setting up a good, solid foundation for SEO in your website architecture. Then keep building over time toward high rankings for more competitive keywords by expanding your website into what Google considers an "authority" site.
Your web analytics will show you your increasing traffic and help you to determine which keywords and which strategies are producing the highest number of new customers. Based on that perspective you will mold your website into a search engine magnet for an ever increasing number of competitive keywords.
