Keyword research is quite possibly the most important part of SEO.
You cannot begin to plan for a campaign unless you know which phrases you are targeting, and you cannot estimate costs and returns from SEO unless you first know who you’re competing against.
This post is pretty long and I will be keeping it up to date, so I have created a table of contents to make it easier to jump ahead to a specific section.
- 2 Schools of Thought
- The Value Of A Keyword
- Researching For Searcher Intent
- Time To Do The Research
- Validate The Big Opportunities
- Create A Keyword Evaluation Model
- Closing The Loop
Getting Started
The goal of this post is to approach keyword research for SEO from it’s roots and build toward the more technical aspects.
Keyword research is the practice of identifying which phrases are used on search engines when people are looking for information, and usually includes finding both the search volume and relative competitiveness of the terms.
Keyword research is a critical component for search engine optimization because when used correctly it provides a road map for both the design and execution of building websites and developing content.
Keywords are usually broken up and grouped based on the number of words within the query phrases. The more words in a keyword phrase usually the easier it is to rank for the term, since usually there is less relative competition.
The reason for all the “usually’s” is that this not absolute, as is the case with most things, there are exceptions…
Here is an example of how keyword difficulty relative to long tail keywords versus head and body keywords usually works:
And here is an example where both the body and the long tail keywords are equally as competitive:
And here is the exception, where a long tail keyword is actually more difficult than the body:
The keyword difficulty data above was gathered using SEOmoz’s keyword difficulty tool on 1/5/13.
It’s worth mentioning that in my experience, this really only ever happens with queries that contain brand names, 9 out of 10 long tail terms are going to be less difficult to rank for than their body and head counterparts.
2 Schools of Thought
In my opinion, SEO tends to focus on one of two areas;
- Optimizing for traffic, or
- Optimizing for conversion
Most SEO’s (and dare i say internet marketers) fall victim to optimizing too heavily for traffic, and not conversion.
It’s not necessarily bad to optimize for traffic, it depends on your goals; if you’re in e-commerce or a service based business it is more valuable to invest your resources in making sure you rank well for the terms that are most likely to lead to a sale; optimize for conversion,not just to gain the visitor.
Where as if you are in the advertising or publishing business, where your revenues are directly correlated to the number of visitors and pageviews, or in other words the volume of eyeballs,then optimizing for traffic is going to be a better strategy.
Like any good SEO campaign, your optimization strategy should be dictated by your campaign goals. If your top level goals are straight-forward, such as increase revenue, then decide which optimization path is going to be the most effective based on your business:
- Does more traffic directly imply more revenue?
- Or do you need to make sure you are acquiring more traffic for specific conversion-focused keywords?
The Value of a Keyword
Within these two school’s of thought a keyword’s value is based on either:
- The monthly search volume relative to the level of competition, or
- The revenue acquisition potential (or conversion rate)
Finding the relative monthly search volume can be done very easily using Google’s keyword tool, but this doesn’t give you any visibility into the competitive landscape for organic results, as the competitive index metrics displayed are for AdWords™.
You need to take into consideration the authority of the websites that are already ranking for these keywords, and get a sense of the competitiveness of that particular organic SERP.
There are a few key signals I look at when doing a 30 second synopsis of a SERP, and my favorite tool to get an on the fly sense of relative competition is the Mozbar extension for chrome, which gives you some at-a-glance SEO data at the URL level conveniently right in the SERP interface.
For a more comprehensive macro analysis of an organic SERP, I’m really liking SerpIQ, shown below:
SEOmoz has a version of this called their keyword rank report, as pictured below for the keyword parking blocks:
But this doesn’t take a look at the SERP as a whole… it doesn’t provide me with quick insight into what it is going to take to compete with these 10 URL’s and get on page 1, at least not without some more in-depth analysis. ajmalseotips.blogspot.com
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