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SEO Tools 3- Analyzing and Researching Focus Keywords |
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Written by admin
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Jul 07, 2005 at 06:56 PM |
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Focus Keywords are the right keywords for your business. Focus keywords get your target audience inside the doors. Focus Keywords define your offering in the most accurately manner to your target audience. In this article I have applied the 3 Cs of business- Company, Customers and Competitors to analyze and research focus keywords. Fourth C- cost, though important is ignored for pure SEO purpose, but would be critical for advertising.
Making sense of millions of keywords Think of Keyword Market Universe as a comprehensive compilation of keywords used e people to find products, services or information on the web. Keyword universe is also influenced by how publishers or website owners describe their products or services to the audience. The later component is particularly important only if you intend to include publisher network in your advertising strategy.
Keywords Universe though a lot scattered has clusters that are concentrated around a lot fewer stems. For example- for “job” market “job” is the prime stem, or the top-level keyword that defines the market. But the keyword “job” by itself is too generic, and people would search for “software jobs” or “accounting jobs” or “marketing jobs”. They may also search for “job interview tips”. So, there might be thousands or maybe millions of websites focusing on “job” keyword. Some offer jobs, others connect candidates to employers, and yet some just offer advice and services.
Selecting keywords for your business- Company Now once you understand the basic stem(s) that define your market audience, you start further refining your target keywords or finding your niche. This strategy is called differentiating. You need to differentiate your offerings from thousands of other publishers who are targeting the same stem(s).
Use Google keyword tool- find specific, similar and broader related keywords
Google Keyword tool is your brainstorming resource. In earlier days of SEO and online advertising we used to sit in a room and do this analysis manually. Now, 95% of work is done by tools. You can analyze the output of the Google Keyword tool or any other similar one to further refine keywords relevant to your website.
More Specific Keywords: This section will make the keyword more qualified. For example job stem may give you any the following suggestions- “job openings”, “ob sites”, “job postings”, and even “Italian job”. Now you analyze these keywords not only for positive ones that you may want to target but the negative ones that you would like to ignore. For example “Italian Job” is clearly wrong specific keyword for a job website.
Expanded Broad Search: This section will explore the singular (or plural) forms, synonyms or words that are very closely related to the main stem. Once again when you find new terms through broad search, you select the ones that are relevant, reject the others, and start the process of making the selected ones more specific. For example, for “job” as main stem, you may want to select “career”, “employment” that are synonyms in this context. And you will reject “opportunities” as the main stem, because it makes the “stem” too generic. In fact you may want to use “opportunities” in conjunction with “job” or “career” to make the main stems more targeted.
Additional Keywords to Consider: This section contains long shots keywords that may be relevant for your business. When I did search for “job”, this section mostly contained keywords that less relevant to a job website, but some of them like “vacancies” or “wage” were good fit. So handpick those keywords from the pool and use them as either stem or qualifiers to make keywords more specific.
Find demand on these keywords- Customers Next when you have the potential list of keywords that apply to your business, use a tool to find the demand on these keywords. Free Overture tool would work fine. It is quite representative of the search on Internet. Google doesn’t disclose its search frequency of keywords on Google. This would now you rank the keywords based on the traffic and also relevant to your business.
Use a threshold to reject search terms that are low in frequency. You can use several techniques here based on the absolute numbers, Top N approach, percentile method or even the desired traffic on your site.
But these numbers and technique depend on the business your website is in. If it is a consumer focusing website, you are probably dealing with very high search frequency numbers, but if you are in a niche market such as B2B parts supply business then the search frequency could be substantially low.
Check for rivalry on the selected keywords- Competition Though it is important to find popular keywords, and selecting the ones that make sense for you business, but sometimes there is overly aggressive competition on some keywords. In your differentiating strategy, it is best not to target such keywords. You don’t want to sell sand on a beach. There are many tools available that will help you understand competition on search terms. CustomizeGoogle gives you an easy mechanism to enter keywords into search box and finding the number of results for those keywords. So, you will need to understand all the forces in play here i.e. Company, Customers and Competitors.
Check how many keywords you have After this analysis, check how many keywords you have. Again this number is contingent on business. Any reasonable website can have 10-50 core search keywords. But this is for sure ignoring the large diversified business and highly scattered audience website.
If required, rank suitable keywords with applicability to your business again and reject the ones that you think are less relevant to your core business strategy.
In conclusion, the 3 Cs of business are very much applicable to online website promotion and search engine optimization. Selecting keywords using this process would ensure that you have covered all the bases for devising a profitable search optimization strategy.
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Last Updated ( Jul 19, 2005 at 12:25 AM )
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Search Engine Optimization