Keyphrase Research and Tools

Our series continues, this time discussing keyphrase research and tools
Keyphrase research

Another aspect of selecting keyphrases is keyphrase research. We know what we are offering, but we aren’t sure what search terms people might use to find it, or else we have so many possible search terms that it would be prohibitively expensive to optimize a site for each one of them.

The first part of keyphrase research would be brainstorming – which is nothing more than making an educated guess. You know your business better than anybody – so the best place to start is with you! We come up with maybe ten or fifteen different keyphrases, or however few or many as may be appropriate to our particular endeavor, which we believe are applicable to our enterprise.

We can also just ask people for suggestions. Friends, family, and especially your existing customer base, if you have one. “What search term would you use to find my product or service on Google?” That’s simple enough. And it provides valuable information.

If you have existing advertising or marketing material, such as print ads, radio or television spots, attempt to extract common themes or elements from them in the selection of keyphrases. Keep in mind that most business web sites are nothing more than souped-up, 21st-century, nice-looking, interactive newspaper classifieds. The content of any existing marketing materials should therefore be a good source of ideas. Also, the marketing materials of your competition should provide a wealth of information for you – especially their web site content. Examine the body text of the web site, and the META information for ideas. Perform a search on Google, Yahoo! or another search engine for the keyphrases you think are correct – and see if what comes up would qualify as competition. If so, see what they are doing - and then do it better! Examination of your competition is both ethical and fruitful. Know your enemy! No use reinventing the wheel if someone else has already invented it for you – just make it better, using steel-belted radials instead of stone. Knowing your competition also enables you to effectively focus on what they are not doing – crucial to your niche marketing.

Later we will discuss something called focus pages. For now, just know that every page of your web site will be optimized according to the contents of that particular page. So if you sell both alligator wallets and snakeskin boots, it is okay to have the multiple, unrelated keyphrases “alligator wallets” and “snakeskin boots”. You do not have to settle for only one, nor do you have to figure out a way to use the term “alligator wallets” on the snakeskin boots page, and vice versa.

Tools useful in keyphrase research

By now we have a list of brainstormed ideas. We know what the competition is doing as well. So let’s drop in our keyphrases and start selling!

Not yet. What if you are missing something. What if everyone (your competition) is missing something? What if one hundred thousand people are searching for the term you think is right, but one hundred million are searching using a different, mystery, search term? How do you find out? There are some great tools available to help you in this regard.

The primary purpose of a keyword research tool is to take your raw brainstorming ideas and convert them into actual search terms. It is one thing for a marketing professional or business owner to speculate as to appropriate keyphrases – it is another thing entirely to be empowered with the knowledge of what search terms your customers are actually using. One useful tool is the Overture Keyword Selector, found at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ . Here, you input a suggested keyphrase, and it delivers a list of related keyphrases that have actually been utilized by individuals searching throughout the Overture (now known as Yahoo! Search Marketing) network in the last month. It also lets you know how many times each keyphrase has actually been utilized. Once you get the results, you may find other, related keyphrases that are extremely popular which you may wish to consider. Nobody wants to optimize their web site for keyphrases for which nobody is searching!

Another useful tool is WordTracker, www.wordtracker.com. This tool utilizes a database of actual Internet searches occurring over the last four months to deliver keyphrases related to your brainstorming ideas. You input your brainstorming ideas, WordTracker outputs suggestions. Then, we take a look at the suggestions, attempting to find popular search terms that we, or most importantly our competition, has failed to recognize. Optimizing for these terms then leaves us with little to no competition for this vast market!

WordTracker does charge a small fee, however you can buy a license good for one day, one week, or one month, depending on your needs.

A powerful tool is KeywordDiscovery, www.keyworddiscovery.com. For a nominal monthly subscription fee, you gain access to a number of features. KeywordDiscovery offers an impressive keyword research tool. You can also search for keywords by industry without having done any brainstorming, which can be very useful if you are just coming up blank. It also offers spelling mistake research, which is a good way to attract customers who make common typographical errors when entering their search query. KeywordDiscovery also provides a related keyword engine, seasonal keyword trends and keyword density analysis. This tool is the tool of choice among many professional SEO firms and consultants.

If you have access to a traffic counter which tracks keywords or your server logs, there is another way to come up with keyphrases. You can examine this data and find out what terms are actually being used by customers at this time to land on your site. The problem with this method is that it doesn’t tell you much – in other words, you have no information about the traffic you are missing. What it can tell you, however, is whether or not your site is attracting quality traffic.

For instance, if your business sells dog sweaters that are specially designed for a three-legged dog and are marketed under the brand name Tripod Pups, with the fourth hole sewn closed so that heat does not escape, and you are able to ascertain that most of your traffic is coming from people searching for “photography accessories”, you know that you are not reaching your niche market. One useful and free tool for adding tracking software to your web site can be found at www.statcounter.com.

How many keyphrases?

Ideally, each page of your web site should be optimized for only one keyphrase, so as not to dilute your keyphrase density. Of course, most web sites offer a number of products and services, all of which they want to be highly visible on the search engines. The short answer to this conundrum is to optimize each page individually according to the main content of that page. The long answer gets us into the topic of focus pages.

If you have more than one product or service, for example not only do you market a product line called Tripod Pups, but also a product line called Bipod Pups for two-legged dogs and Monopod Pups for one-legged dogs, it becomes difficult to effectively optimize your web site using common keyphrases throughout the site. This highlights the need for individual page optimization.

What we want to do is to create separate pages which feature each product line and are optimized for only the search query which relates to that product line. So we now need to make our one page web site a three page web site. Each page focuses on the individual product line for which you are desirous of attracting traffic.

To avoid the use of “mirror pages”, which we will discuss more in depth later, we will need to rewrite the content so that there is a noticeable difference from page to page. It is probably not sufficient to merely do a “find and replace” type edit of the content, the only difference from one page to the next being the substitution of one search term for another.

We have now concluded our selection of keyphrases. We know what our competition is doing, we know what our customers are searching for, we have identified both our niche market and common misspellings.

About the Author: Matt Foster is the President of ArteWorks Business Class and is an expert in search engine optimization. Mr. Foster has been active in the industry since 1995. For further information, please visit www.arteworks.biz or www.search-bully.com.