Targeting the Right Keywords with SEO

My fam­ily and I recently vis­ited a well known beach board­walk on the west coast. While walk­ing the board­walk, tempted by car­ni­val games, fun­nel cakes and cot­ton candy, there was one car­ni­val game that caught my eye. The game was sim­ple: throw a dart at a wall cov­ered in lit­tle star tar­gets, land the dart inside one of the red stars and win a prize.

The dart game looked easy enough, so I exchanged money with the game atten­dant, was handed a dart, and pre­ceded with my pathetic attempt to win a prize for my child. After stand­ing there for a few sec­onds I real­ized that with over a hun­dred tar­gets to choose from, it was dif­fi­cult to decide where to focus my atten­tion. I blindly threw the dart and didn’t come close. Sadly, it took me two more tries before dumb luck allowed me to even­tu­ally con­nect with a star. I begrudg­ingly handed the $.05 prize to my excited son and headed back to the fun­nel cakes.

Look­ing back I couldn’t help but real­ize how much more dif­fi­cult that car­ni­val game was com­pared to play­ing darts on a stan­dard dart board. Hav­ing a clear tar­get, like a dart board, allows you to bet­ter focus your atten­tion and play with more confidence.

Tar­get­ing the Right Keywords

Tar­get­ing the “right” key­words is the most impor­tant first step to any SEO project. For some, this might seem like a bla­tantly obvi­ous prin­ci­ple, but you’d be sur­prised at how many orga­ni­za­tions have dropped the ball with this crit­i­cal first step.

What are your “money” key­words? Which are your top con­vert­ing key­words from organic search? If you can’t answer these ques­tions, you may be in need of some focused key­word research.

Mov­ing for­ward with SEO before doing com­pre­hen­sive key­word research is like pro­mot­ing a huge Mixed Mar­tial Arts event on The Life­time Chan­nel- you’re wast­ing valu­able resources on the wrong audi­ence. Select­ing the best key­words will allow you to reach the best prospects.

Key­word Mining

• Inter­nal Min­ing: The first step in this process is a good old fash­ioned brain dump. Brain­storm every pos­si­ble vari­a­tion you can think of — this process is designed to help you define your organization’s inter­nal ter­mi­nol­ogy. It’s impor­tant to avoid the web dur­ing this stage, as you don’t want any out­side influ­ences to impact this inter­nal brain­storm­ing process. I sug­gest you avoid your com­puter entirely and just use a white board or a piece of paper to jot down all your thoughts and ideas. Dur­ing this process it’s often help­ful to group your key­words into log­i­cal cat­e­gories to help your research be more focused as you move through the research process.

• Com­pet­i­tive Min­ing: Dur­ing this next step you’ll review your top com­peti­tors’ sites to iden­tify addi­tional key­word vari­a­tions. Using tools such as SEO Dig­ger, Com­pete, or Google AdWords Key­word Tool can be very help­ful in min­ing your competitor’s site for key­word data.

• Search Data Min­ing: Review­ing search engine data is the last step in the research phase. This search engine key­word data pro­vides insight into what com­mon key­word terms users are actu­ally search­ing. Most tools pro­vide esti­mated search vol­ume esti­mates for each key­word, as well as key­word ontology/suggestion func­tions. This process is typ­i­cally the most help­ful in dis­cov­er­ing gaps in your key­word research.

Some of the best research tools include: Google AdWords Key­word Tool, Microsoft adCen­ter Labs, Key­word Dis­cov­ery, and Word­tracker, among others.

A screen­shot of Google AdWords Key­word Tool

Once you’ve mined all of your poten­tial key­words, it’s time for a crit­i­cal review of your key­word list. If you haven’t already done so, you should log­i­cally group or silo your key­words by top­i­cal cat­e­gories. You should also review the list for any unre­lated or neg­a­tive key­words which don’t apply to your busi­ness. Once you’ve final­ized this list it’s time to move on to testing.

Test­ing & Ana­lyz­ing your Keywords:

Sim­ply put, you need to test the effec­tive­ness of your key­words before you begin to opti­mize your pages.

The eas­i­est way to test is to ana­lyze your exist­ing data. Your web ana­lyt­ics data can be a rich source of data regard­ing past key­word per­for­mance from both organic search and paid search. Eval­u­ate the suc­cess of these key­words based on key per­for­mance indi­ca­tors tied to true com­pany objec­tives (i.e. orders, rev­enue, leads, etc…).  Don’t fall into the trap of mea­sur­ing suc­cess by traf­fic alone, as this can often lead to problems.

If you don’t have data to mea­sure past key­word per­for­mance, I highly rec­om­mend you move for­ward with a paid search cam­paign to gather the data you need. This can often be a costly project, but it is well worth the invest­ment. The infor­ma­tion you will gather will help you dis­cover your money key­word terms. With this knowl­edge you can con­fi­dently move for­ward with the opti­miza­tion of your site.

Opti­mize & Monitor:

Now that you’ve final­ized your key­word list through thor­ough dis­cov­ery and analy­sis, it’s time to move for­ward with opti­miza­tion of your site. While you’re work­ing to opti­mize the var­i­ous pages on your site for your “money” phrases, you should also be plan­ning a care­ful strat­egy to accu­rately mea­sure the per­for­mance and these pages and key­words. Closely mon­i­tor­ing the per­for­mance of the pages and key­words will allow you make changes to your plan when needed and be pre­pared to deploy appro­pri­ate resources.  SEO is not a “set it and for­get it” process.  When your per­for­mance is mea­sured, your per­for­mance will improve.

Whether you’re in the process of devel­op­ing new con­tent, launch­ing a new site, or even re-visiting your exist­ing key­word strat­egy, remem­ber to fol­low the steps I’ve out­lined above before mov­ing for­ward. Fol­low­ing these basic key­word research guide­lines will save you valu­able time and resources, help­ing you tar­get the key­words that will drive suc­cess for your business.