Showing posts with label Keyword Research. Show all posts

Keywords are the words and phrases used to describe your business, products and services. The factors below lead to a wide range of possible keywords for each product or service that the search engines see as unique.

• Synonyms
• Variations (plurals, spellings)
  
• Qualifiers (adjectives, descriptors and their synonyms)

Synonyms
Google does a pretty good job of recognising synonyms and returning web pages that don't necessarily contain a search term but do contain a synonym for that term. For example, a Google search for 'new automobile' returns many results containing the word 'car' as a synonym. However, a search for 'new car' does not return exactly the same results in the same order, so Google does (at this time) still recognise them as different keywords.

Variations
Keyword variations include plurals, different country spellings, common misspellings, shorthand spellings, different word orders etc. Again, Google is pretty good at recognising that these are different variations of the same word, however they still don't always return exactly the same results when these variations are searched for so we have to treat them as unique keywords.

Qualifiers
Qualifiers are additional words added to better describe or further qualify what the keyword is referring to. They can be loosely categorised as either specific or non-specific.

Specific
These are qualifiers that specifically relate to that product or industry, such as brand names or a word like 'spoiler' which specifically relates to cars.

Non Specific
These are more general qualifiers that are common across many industries such as words relating to colour, size, price, quality etc.

Not every qualifier will fall neatly into one of these categories. Many will sit somewhere in between, making it more of a continuum. I have discussed search qualifiers in the past with my posts on location qualifiers, discussing the different qualifiers people use when looking for local or location-specific results and my post on business qualifiers, discussing the different ways people look for businesses. The keywords produced from adding multiple qualifiers are often referred to as 'long tail keywords.'

The diagram below shows how the number of potential keywords can quickly escalate when you consider synonyms, variations and qualifiers.


Which Keyword Should I Use?
The best keywords will have:

• High amounts of search traffic
• Low competition
• A high conversion rate
  

You can try and guess which keywords will have the best combination of these three things but that will be very difficult to do accurately. To get the best results you should do keyword research to collect and analyse the data and determine which keywords will be best to target.

Is Keyword Research Necessary?
No. Not everyone needs to do keyword research to be successful. However, it's more important if:

• You are targeting a small market- If there is only a small number of customers out there, you want to make sure you're targeting a keyword that has a worthwhile amount of traffic. In some industries these keywords might be obvious, but in others not so much.
  
• You are in a competitive industry- because you may pick a keyword that has such high competition that you have no chance of ranking for it.
• You want to get the most out of your website- Keyword research will help you get the maximum return from your website.
  

I Don't Want to Do Keyword Research
If you decide not to do keyword research there are a few things to keep in mind to maximise your chances of success.

• Choose keywords that are descriptive and relevant to the subject of the page
• Try and think of your products from an outsider's perspective, how might they search for them without knowledge of the industry?
• Remember that longer keywords (more words in them) tend to have lower competition and produce a higher conversion rate, but they also have lower traffic.
  

Once you have chosen your keywords, you need to incorporate them into your website especially your page titles, headings, urls and content. This is known as on-site optimisation.

In a previous post I talked about location qualifiers, in this post I'm talking about a similar concept, business qualifiers. The question is, what words do people use when they are looking for a business. Here's a few that I came up with.

General Business

• Business
• Company
• Sole trader
• Enterprise

Service Provider

• Agency
• Firm
• Partnership
• Service
• Consultant
  

Goods Provider

• Product
• Shop
• Store
• Market

Its clear that some of these words would be used in specific situations such as 'accounting firm' instead of 'accounting business.' But, for other words its not so clear. Lets look at some definitions.

• Business- A business is a legally recognised organisation designed to provide goods and/or services to consumers- Wikipedia
  
• Company- A company is a body corporate or corporation company registered under the Companies Acts or similar legislation. It does not include a partnership or any other unincorporated group of persons, although such an entity may be loosely described as a company- Wikipedia
  
• Agency- A business or organisation established to provide a particular service, typically one that involves organising transactions between two other parties- Google
  
• Firm- A business concern, esp. one involving a partnership of two or more people- Google
• Enterprise- a company organised for commercial purposes; business firm- Dictionary.com

As you can see, there is a lot of similarity between the definitions so it would seem likely that people would often use them largely interchangeably, depending on what they're used to in each context. Here's some search traffic and competition data for each business qualifier.

Business Qualifier	Search Volume	Competing Pages
Business	2,740,000	296 million
Shop	2,240,000	85.8 million
Service	1,830,000	261 million
Store	1,830,000	83.2 million
Company	1,220,000	446 million
Market	1,220,000	96.6 million
Product	450,000	105 million
Agency	368,000	59.8 million
Enterprise	165,000	25.2 million
Consultant	110,000	18.7 million
Firm	90,500	31.5 million
Partnership	60,500	12.8 million
Sole Trader	18,100	0.256 million

What does this mean?

When doing keyword research we need to take into account the different ways that someone could look for a business. If its not the normal way that people look for a business, such as 'accounting business' instead of the norm 'accounting firm,' you might find the keyword has much less competition and is more profitable to target.

What 'business qualifiers' do you use when searching for businesses?

Search traffic is a very important factor to consider when trying to choose which keywords to target. In this article we will discuss:

• Where to get the data
• Which data to look at
• What is the right amount of traffic

Where to Get the Data

The best place to get search traffic data is Google's free keyword tool. They maintain that the data is an estimate, not exact, but it is the best source of data you are going to find. If you're signed into an Adwords account when you use the tool you can get more keywords at once (up to 800). Wordtracker provide an alternative keyword tool.

Some other tools to give you extra data and insight:

• Google Insights for Search
  
• Google Trends
  
• Google's Wonderwheel

Which Data to Look At

You want to know how many searches are performed for each keyword but there's three different measures of that data that you can use. I've blogged in the past about the difference between broad, phrase and exact match data, but here it is again briefly:

• Broad: Searches that contain the words in any order, with any number of other words in between.
• Phrase: Searches that contain the words in that exact order, with any number of other words before and/or after.
• Exact: Searches that contain only that exact phrase, with no other words.

In general, the number of searches will be highest for broad match and lowest for exact match, with phrase match somewhere in between, usually closer to broad. I like to use phrase match data but you can go to my post mentioned above for more information on each and make up your own mind.

Phrase-Broad Ratio
Another useful statistic to look at is the phrase-broad match ratio (PBR). You can calculate this by dividing the phrase match search volume by the broad match search volume. A low PBR will tell us that there could be another phrase, made up of the same words as the phrase we are looking at, that gets more traffic than this phrase. In general, you want to focus on the word combination that gets the most traffic.

Search Trends
It's worth looking at the trend for the keyword search traffic which Google's keyword tool will give you especially if the keywords you are looking at might be seasonally effected. Google insights for search and Google trends will also give you good trend data which can also be broken down into subregions like 'south australia' which you can't do with the keyword tool.

SEO Traffic
This is a measure of how much traffic you would be expected to get if you ranked at number one for the keyword. The number one result gets 42% of clicks on average. If you are looking at a local market, such as Adelaide, you need to make a further adjustment to get the number of searches for the local market (as the keyword tool only gives data for Australia as a whole). I use a rough calculation based on the approximate proportion of people in Adelaide to people in Australia as a whole (1 million to 20 million), so I divide the number of searches by 20 to get the local SEO Traffic. So, all together:

Adelaide SEO Traffic for number 1 ranking = Total Searches Australia x 0.42 x *0.05

*this adjustment assumes that the keyword doesn't include location qualifiers such as 'adelaide,' or 'south australia.'

What is the Right Amount of Traffic

The more traffic a keyword can deliver you, the better. However, you will find that the keywords that deliver the higher amounts of traffic also have the highest level of competition and in some cases too high to target. In those cases you need to pick a keyword with lower traffic, but how low is too low?

One way to judge the volume of traffic is to figure out how many conversions that level of traffic is likely to bring in and compare that to your targets. If you assume that 1 in 20 people who visit your indian restaurant website after searching for 'indian restaurant adelaide' end up making a reservation at the restaurant and your target is 50 reservations a week, you would need a keyword with a local SEO traffic of at least 1000 per week.

Required SEO Traffic = Conversion Target / Conversion Rate

However, when using this line of thinking you need to take into account that most search traffic and conversions do not come from the keywords that have the highest individual volume, but from a combination of the longer phrases, known as the long tail. Market Samurai recommends a minimum SEO Traffic of 1521 searches/ month (50/day) as part of its golden rules filter.

Market Samurai also recommends a PBR of at least 15% or 0.15. With regards to search trends, if the keyword your are looking at is continually trending downwards, year after year then its probably not the best keyword for you for the long term. If you discover that a keyword is very seasonal then that would be something to keep in mind if you need a consistent flow of traffic through all seasons.

Market Samurai is the software I use for keyword research.

www.marketsamurai.com

Golden Rule Filters

Market Samurai comes with a preset filter called the 'Golden Rules.' These are the values they recommend when doing keyword research.

SEO Traffic > 50 / day
SEO Local Competition < 100,000 pages
PBR > 15%
SEO Value > $30/day

How do you know which keywords are the best to target?

I think this is one of the most under-covered topics in SEO. There are many articles about how to do keyword research, that is how to get the data, but very few articles discuss how to analyse that data and actually select the keywords to target. There are three main factors to consider when selecting target keywords:

• Search Traffic- How often the keyword is searched for.
• Competition- How strong the competition for that keyword is, ie. how hard it will be to rank well for the keyword.
• Commercial Value- How likely is it that people who use the keyword will buy something from you.

For each analysis factor there are a number of pieces of data to evaluate, they are listed below. There are many different opinions in the industry about which data points are the best indicators to look at when analysing keywords. I will be covering each of the keyword analysis factors in articles over the coming weeks.

Search Traffic

• Broad match searches
• Phrase match searches
• Exact match searches
• Search trends
• SEO Traffic
• Phrase to Broad match ratio
  

Competition

• Number of results in Google (.com.au for Australia) for the keyword
• Number of results in Google for the keyword in quotes
• Number of results in Google that contain the keyword in the title
• Strength of the first page of results in Google, looking at:
• Domain age
  
• PageRank
• Incoming links to the page
• Incoming links to the domain
• Incoming links from .edu and .gov domains
  
• Existence of the keywords in the title, header, description and url
  

Commercial Value

• Adwords Cost per Click
• The number of words in the phrase
• The existence of money words such as 'buy'
• A subjective analysis of relevancy
• A subjective analysis of focus
• SEO Value

Many people use 'location qualifiers' within their search terms to bring back more local results. How do you search for local results?

There are many different ways of searching to get more local results. I used the example 'Indian restaurants' in a previous article to show how the different local searching methods yielded different numbers of competing websites. One method is to use a location qualifier, such as 'Adelaide,' as part of your search query. Here is a table with the top three location qualifiers for Adelaide:

Location Qualifier	Number of Searches
Adelaide	5 000 000
South Australia	815 000
Adelaide Hills	39 000

This table contains the number of searches over the course of a month for the location qualifiers plus at least one other word.

What Does This Mean?

When looking for local results, many people use the location qualifier 'Adelaide.' Throughout your keyword research you should make sure to analyse terms that include the location qualifiers 'Adelaide' and 'South Australia' and compare the search volumes to normal searches, adjusted to Adelaide's relative size.

How Do You Look For Local Results?

Let me know in the comments below how you look for local results. Maybe you don't use search engines at all, maybe you use online directories or the old yellow pages. Go on, add a comment!

There are three different types of keyword search traffic data; broad, phrase and exact. This article explains the differences and advantages and disadvantages of each.

• Broad- Counts all the searches that include all the search terms, in any order and with any number of other words in between.
• Phrase- Counts searches that include the search terms in that order, with no other words in between but with any number of other words before or after.
• Exact- Counts only searches for that exact phrase, in that order and with no other words.
  

	Broad	Phrase	Exact
Traffic	Higher	In Between	Lower
Competition	Higher	In Between	Lower
Relevancy	Lower	In Between	Higher
Advantages	Gives an indication of the total potential search traffic of the niche	Gives a much higher relevancy than broad Gives a good indication of niche potential including medium-long tail keywords	Includes only the most relevant search data Easy to quantify competition
Disadvantages	Overall competition will be much higher and the competition of the included search phrases will be difficult to quantify Overall relevancy will be lower and the relevancy of the included search phrases will be difficult to quantify	Some included searches will still be irrelevant or undesirable	Gives only a conservative indication of search traffic potential

Phrase to Broad Ratio (PBR)

The ratio of phrase/broad searches can give us an indication of whether the search term we are analysing is the most popular order and fit for the broader niche. A low PBR could mean that a different order of the search terms might be more appropriate or that most people search with other terms in between the terms being analysed.

So which one should I use?

Never use broad match to analyse individual keyword search traffic, only as an indication of the total size of the niche and to calculate the Phrase to Broad Ratio, discussed above. Use exact match as a safe indication of search traffic with phrase match being what you can expect as your page/website gains more authority. In the longer term you can expect your traffic to approach the broach match figure but this traffic will likely have higher bounce rates and lower conversion rates as its much less likely to be relevant.

Keyword Competition Analysis

For keyword competition analysis, use phrase/exact match (which are the same thing when doing competition analysis). Broad match will give an indication of how many webpages are targeting the general niche while phrase/exact match will tell you how many webpages are targeting your specific phrase.

A Slightly Different Take

I should point out that there is still some disagreement in the internet marketing community over which match type is the most important to look at. The video below, from Market Samurai, gives a great explanation of each match type and also addresses keyword competition. The video also explains the alternative view that broad match data should be used when assessing potential keyword search traffic.

Traffic analysis is an important part of keyword research. Some adjustments need to be made to the raw data to get figures more useful for local SEO.

Google provides some very useful data through their generator tool that gives us the number of searches for different target keywords. For Australian keyword research we can only narrow the data down to the country level, not individual cities. Therefore some adjustments are required to give us an estimate of keyword traffic for a specific city.

One option is to attribute the number of searches coming from a city as proportionate to the relative population size. Adelaide has a population of around 1.28 million which is 0.064 of the population of Australia (20 million). The Google keyword tool tells us there are 60,500 (broad) searches for 'Indian Restaurant' in Australia every month. If we make our adjustment, we can attribute 3872 of those to Adelaide (0.064 x 60,500).

Keywords that already have a location included in them, such as 'Indian restaurant Adelaide' don't need an adjustment as the vast majority of searches are going to be from Adelaide already. Below is a table compiling search data for keywords that include 'Adelaide' as a location identifier and keywords that have been adjusted to Adelaide from entire country data.

Keyword	Adelaide Searches (adjusted)	Unadjusted Searches (Broad)
adelaide indian	5400	5400
indian restaurant	3872	60500
indian recipes	1734.4	27100
indian restaurants adelaide	1600	1600
indian restaurants	1420.8	22200
indian foods	1420.8	22200
indian takeaway adelaide	1000	1000
curry recipes	947.2	14800
indian curry	947.2	14800
butter chicken recipe	633.6	9900
indian take away	422.4	6600
indian grocery	345.6	5400
arya restaurant adelaide	170	170

This data is for searches over a month. Due to the nature of broad match data there is some cross contamination of searches, e.g. the unadjusted data for 'indian restaurant' would include searches for 'indian restaurant adelaide,' therefore this table should only be used as a guide.

There's both 'Adelaide' and adjusted keywords within the most searched terms so its important to consider both when assessing local keyword traffic.

The next step in keyword research would be to compare the competition for the various keywords. My post from last week covers local keyword competition analysis.

One of the important steps in keyword research is to assess the competition of the phrases you are analysing. The accepted method for doing this is to look at the number of web pages that are generated when you do a search (located directly below the search bar in Google's search results). When we are talking about local search, there are a number of different ways of searching to get more geographically relevant results. For Adelaide, these might include:

Local Search Method	Number of Results
None. (Google.com)	11 900 000
Google Australia (Google.com.au)	4 530 000
Google Australia + Pages from Australia	649 000
Searching for 'Indian Restaurant Adelaide'	170 000
Google Places Search	682

Note: Google places appeared in several of the normal results searches as well

The most relevant results seem to come from the Places search so we can probably assume the the searching trend will be towards that method of search, although adding 'Adelaide' to the search did result in a lot of relevant results also.

Value Proposition

A value propopostion is a marketing statement that summarises why a consumer should buy a product or use a service. This statement should convince a potential consumer that one particular product or service will add more value or better solve a problem than other similar offerings.

There can be many possible value propositions for a specific product depending on which aspect of the product you decide to focus on. Your market and keyword research will identify several potential product aspects that customers value and are searching for. The research will be accompanied by data showing the competition, relevancy and value of each product aspect to help you make a decision about which one to target.

Product & Competitive Analysis

Identify your key competitors on the web and analyse their websites with the above six questions in mind. Compare and contrast their offereings with yours to determine which aspects of your offering are more exclusive and more valuable.

Brainstorm all the keywords and phrases that describe your product or offering and analyse which of those each of your competitors tend to focus on.

Keyword research is a practice used by search engine optimisation professionals to find and research actual search terms people enter into the search engines when conducting a search.- Wikipedia

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Wicked Cow Marketing provides Keyword Research as part of their Search Engine Optimisation services for Adelaide and the Adelaide Hills. They focus on content development, link building, on-site optimisation and social search.

Contact Wicked Cow Marketing today for a Free Consultation

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The process and results of keyword research and analysis done for the Superplay case study.

The process of determining the keywords being used by your target market that will will give you the best return on investment.