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SEO Key Word Strategy: Strategy and Tactics for Keyword Marketing on Google / SEO
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Selecting great keywords (or key words as some people spell them) is a major challenge for effective SEO. Great keywords have both high volume (i.e., are used frequently by your potential customers) and great value (represent 'buy' words that indicate a potential customer). Beyond that there is a lot of strategy in keywords and SEO. In competitive markets, you need to look for keywords that you can actually succeed at, as well as powerful, attractive keywords. This post discusses how.
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By Jason McDonald
Senior SEO Instructor - JM Internet Group.
Posted: April 21, 2010
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Contents:
Identifying Great SEO Keywords
Google, Yahoo, Bing - all of the search engines are 'pull' media. This means that nothing happens until your potential customer begins with a keyword. He or she must 'think of' a keyword or keyphrase and put it into the search box. Unlike TV where you can 'push' your message to the coach potatoes of America, or print / magazines where readers 'browse' and might see your ads, on Google, your potential customers start the process. They pull the SEO content and PPC ads from the search engine.
In our class on SEO, I teach the basics of keywords. One of the best keyword tools is the Google AdWords Keyword tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. Enter a core keyword such as 'medical malpractice' and Google will spit back at you the search volumes for this keyword / keyphrase, and it will also give you keyword value if you select Average CPC.
In simple format, we have - term - Average CPC - Volume
malpractice medical $11.61 673000
medical malpractice $11.61 673000
medical malpractice lawyer $14.22 110000
medical malpractice attorney $15.89 90500
medical malpractice lawyers $17.70 60500
medical malpractice attorneys $16.01 49500
medical malpractice insurance $5.67 49500
medical malpractice law $13.64 22200
medical malpractice cases $7.74 14800
medical malpractice lawsuit $7.67 8100
medical malpractice claims $8.82 6600
medical malpractice lawsuits $5.78 6600
medical malpractice firm $0.05 5400
medical malpractice law firm $11.73 5400
medical malpractice reform $2.45 5400
If we are a medical malpractice attorney we are looking for high volume searches that are also high value to us. So the generic high volume search 'medical malpractice' isn't as valuable to us as the longer tail search, 'medical malpractice lawyer' or 'medical malpractice attorney.' Indeed, adding a geographic terms such as 'san francisco' makes these searches even more valuable! Searches such as 'claims' or 'insurance' are probably not valuable at all, indicating non-customers such as people seeking insurance.
So our first conclusion is to look for high volume AND high value searches to us. The CPC column is a clue to what our competitors are willing to pay - i.e., their value. You can see the higher value for 'lawyer' and 'attorney' searches in the above vs. 'insurance' or 'reform.'
One tactic, therefore, is to realize that lower volume searches may have higher values. This is really good news because, in general, it is easier to get to the top positions on long tail searches than on short tail searches (single or double words), because there is less competition.
Volume vs. Value
The volume / value trade-off, however, can be rather confusing. Should we concentrate on high volume keywords? Or high value? Where is the sweet spot in SEO? And none of this is (yet) about implementation: tactics to implement these keywords in terms of on-page SEO (page tags) or off-page SEO (links).
I like to think of the value / volume trade off as the intersection of customer needs and my value proposition. If I am a medical malpractice attorney in San Francisco my unique value proposition is legal services for people who want to sue doctors in California. So, a search for 'medical malpractice' while high volume, isn't really that great. It has a lot of NOISE. A lot of other searchers (people in Georgia, for example. People looking to research the medical malpractice crisis. Doctors seeking insurance...). The 'volume' is another word for 'noise.'
So like tuning a radio, I am tuning in to my potential customers. That's where you see that the addition of a term like 'lawyer' 'law firm' or 'attorney' clarifies the search. Yes, the raw volume goes down, but a lot of that is just noise. Useless searches that really don't help me anyway.
So a second tactic is to focus, focus, focus. Try to devine those 'helper' words like 'lawyer' or 'san francisco' that focus the search query into a truly valuable one. A lot of people call these 'buy' words. So on your keyword worksheet try to identify those magical words that turn a raw search into a high value search, indicating a customer that is ready to begin to seek you out.
Beyond the Google keyword tool, two other tools are really fantastic for this keyword discovery. One is Google Analytics. In Analytics, select a 'landing page' and then select 'content detail,' and 'entrance keywords.' Select 500 keywords. You are browsing for keyword suggestions from users. I found for SEO, for example, that many users used the words 'Tutorial' and 'How To' and thereby adjusted my strategy to blog using those words.
A second great tool, if you can afford it, is to run an AdWords ad campaign and use the broad match selection. Then go into that ad group, and select 'see search terms.' (I teach how to do this in the AdWords class). The great thing here is you are getting new additional information on possible words used by your customers. You can then go back and add these new terms to your SEO strategy!
Keyword Competition and Strategy
The final aspect after we identify high value / high volume keywords is to identify potential keywords that are relatively less competitive. These are truly great keywords, and very hard to find. How do we measure competition?
First, cost per click. Higher values in the CPC column clearly indicate higher competition. If people are paying money on advertising, you can bet that they are also seeking to optmize their SEO. Another metric is to do your target keyword searches, and simply count the number of AdWords ads that appear and the number of search results Google indicates. Especially, a lot of ads is another indication of advertiser competition. Finally, the Google tool also has an available column of advertiser competition.
Note that in the tool you can click on any column - including competition and sort ascending or descending. You can also export the data into CSV / Excel and further manipulate it.
- Basically, you are looking for high value keywords (keywords that clearly indicate a potential customer that matches your value proposition), high volume (customers actually use these words), and low competition (your competitors haven't 'thought of') these keywords. That's a tall order, but you are shooting to get closer to this ideal rather than farther away.
Once identified, you can then blog, create pages, news, and other content that most precisely matches these target keywords. It's not easy, but you have at least identified keywords that matter to you (a lot) and hopefully have slightly less competition.
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