Anatomy of a Web Marketing Makeover – The Nuts and Bolts of Keyword Research
(Note: this is part of a series of posts on the marketing makeover of a consultant’s Web site.)
My client gave me a wish list of phrases for which she wants her site to rank when people type them into search engines. Naturally, she’s got some very broad and impossibly competitive terms on her list. It’s very common for people to think they want to rank for broad terms. Then they realize that even if they ranked highly for the broad terms, they wouldn’t be getting targeted traffic.
For instance, if you’re an HR consultant, it wouldn’t do you much good to rank for the word “consultant.” What are people looking for when they type just the word “consultant?” A management consultant? An IT consultant? You’d be getting traffic but not customers.
Plus, some terms are impossibly competitive. Here's an eye-popping example. Because of lucrative asbestos lawsuits there are lots of lawyers who would like to come up first in a search for “mesothelioma attorney.” But from what I can see on Google, there are over 322,000 pages are already optimized for that phrase. The Wall St. Journal reported a couple of years ago that firms were paying $100 per click to buy the phrase on Overture. It would take big bucks to compete in that kind of arena.
There are lots of tools that help you do keyword research, but the most important tool is your brain. You have to think about what makes sense for your business and your clients. They will be searching for things from their perspective, not yours. So it may make sense to use phrases based on what they need rather than on what you offer.
Assuming your brain is on board for the art side of keyword research, here are some free tools for the science of it. (Professional SEOs also use for-fee tools, which I won’t get into here):
- WordTracker (has a free trial, otherwise you pay)
- Digital Point’s Keyword Suggestion Tool (combines free results from Wordtracker and Overture. I’m more apt to trust Wordtracker if they differ.)
- NicheBot (one tool that does it all)
- Google AdWords Keyword Tool
- Also, you can always Google your phrase, Google the phrase in quotes, and Google “allintitle:your phrase” to see how many other pages are already using it
Some of these help you find out how competitive or widely-used certain key phrases are. Others give you suggestions for related or similar key phrases that may work better. A definitive trick SEO consultants use is to run a Google AdWords campaign for a few weeks to see how phrases really perform. If you’ve already been using Google AdWords, you can certainly apply what you’ve learned from it to your SEO.
Back to my client. Because she is targeting a certain part of the country, and tends to specialize in a couple of industries, we can narrow down her search phrases so they’re more specific. This means that people who reach her site after searching these phrases are more apt to buy from her. Also, because these targeted phrases are less competitive she’s got a better chance of ranking well with them.
I also look for the most often-searched phrases (which are often extremely competitive) and use them along with my client’s geographic or industry specialties. Every phrase I analyze makes me think of others, so I check them out too. After lots of searching, clicking, copying, and pasting I’ve got a huge spreadsheet of phrases I think will work best.
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