One of the first steps in optimising a site for search engines is researching which keywords you want your site to perform well on in search engine listings. It’s important to bear in mind that keyword research is not an exact science. You should use a variety of tools and above all see it as an iterative process that is informed by regular feedback from good quality web statistics.
What makes a good keyword?
There are two main criteria that determine whether or not you should be working to optimise your site for a particular keyword: search volume and competitiveness.
Search volume
This refers to how many people out there are actually searching on a particular key phrase. After all, there’s no point being top in all the search engines for a phrase that nobody ever searches on.
Finding out search volumes is a tricky business – there is no one tool out there that can give you exact and reliable figures so you have to work with what is available.
- Overture used to be the tool of choice for many, but this has since been taken over by Yahoo and its usefulness severely curtailed.
- Wordtracker is based on returns from the Dogpile\MetaCrawler search engines, and suggests keywords based on real life search data. It can be useful, particularly when trying to discover potential new keywords, but Wordtracker’s results are based on as little as 0.05% of the total number of internet searches. In statistical terms this is not a credible sample set – indeed it renders the results technically irrelevant.
- Keyword Discovery is a similar tool to Wordtracker, taking its data from a slightly wider range of search engines and storing data for a longer period of time, allowing you to take seasonal fluctuations into account.
- Both Google and Yahoo offer search volume tools as part of their respective AdWords packages. These don’t pretend to give you any exact data, but they do at least place search phrases into categories, i.e. “low”, “medium” and “high”, which gives you a useful relative indication. Unlike Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery, they allow you to filter results by geographic location, allowing you to research on a far more accurate sample size.
No tools out there will give you exact numbers for your target audience. However, intelligent use of a range of tools can be useful guides – they can provoke suggestions, they can suggest trends and they can help you to make more informed decisions.
Competitiveness
Once you have established keywords that are the most popular and relevant to your site, you will need some idea of how much competition there is out there for each keyword.
Given the time, effort and expense involved in promoting a site, you don’t want to waste time optimising for a particular phrase when you have no realistic chance of making an impact. You have to make a decision on the phrases that you will concentrate on based upon the amount of traffic they will deliver and the amount of effort you will have to invest in optimising for them.
How do you measure competitiveness? There are many different approaches to this – the most straightforward is typing the phrase into Google and seeing how many results come back. However, this is only an indication of the quantity of competition rather than the quality. There are a number of more subtle approaches that you should consider if you want a genuine idea of how long it will take to move your site up the search engine rankings for a particular phrase:
- How many pages are returned by Google for the exact phrase? If you type in the phrase enclosed in quote marks then Google will return a lower number of results, but these results will be indexed for the exact phrase rather than a close match.
- How many pages have included the phrase in their title? A page’s title is one of the most important on-page factors used by search engines to determine their content. If you type allintitle: [key phrase] into Google then it will only return pages where the key phrase is included in the title line. This gives you an indication of how many results are being actively optimised for that key phrase.
- Take a closer look at the pages that appear in the top results for your key phrase. Are they home pages on well-established sites? Are they being actively optimised, or are they just there out of chance? These are the sites that you will be competing with if you are going to make it to the top of the search results.
Making the call
The ideal phrase is one with high traffic and low competition. These phrases are hard to find, but in most cases you will find the occasional gem that can deliver you a surprising amount of traffic with relatively little effort.
Making an exact call on which keywords to go for is difficult given the lack of exact data – there is no magic ratio between search volume and competition. Wordtracker offers a formula that it calls the Keyword Effectiveness Index – essentially a simple ratio between keyword popularlity and competition. However, given the limitations of Wordtracker’s sample size, this can only be an approximation masquerading as an exact indicator.
Keyword discovery – things to bear in mind
When preparing a list of keywords, it is critical that you have a thorough understanding of the subject that you are researching on. The first step in any process of keyword research starts with your own knowledge and imagination. Valuable phrases that you miss through a lack of understanding will be a missed opportunity.
Geographic location is important as certain phrases may have different meanings in different countries. You may find that keyword research based on American search results has limited value to a European market. For example, in recruitment the phrase “resume” is used far more than the British “CV”.
You should also be aware of seasonal fluctuations. Do holiday periods have an impact on your searches? Bear in mind that September and January are generally peak times for most commercial web traffic. Don’t be fooled into thinking a keyword will deliver traffic all year round on the basis of a seasonal blip.
It is important not to assume that everybody uses the internet in the same way as you. Everybody has their own style of searching which can affect the form of keywords that they use to the amount of detail that they enter in their first search. Keyword tools, although inaccurate, are a useful indicator of how other people are really searching for things on the internet.
The importance of feedback
Finally, it’s worth stressing that keyword research should be an iterative process. You won’t get it right first time and you will need to re-visit your research regularly to understand where you’ve gone wrong and where you’ve got it right.
The value of your search engine effort shouldn’t just be measured in terms of raw visitor numbers either. Before you start you should have an idea of what kind of traffic you want to attract and what kind of return on investment you expect to see.