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The Best SEO Keyword Suggestion Tool - Your Own Keyword Worksheet
- Question: What is the best way to organize one's keywords? We have used the various free SEO keyword tools out there, particularly the free Google keyword tools. But there are so many keywords, how do we get organized?
- Numerous Students, Worldwide
December 12, 2009
- Answer -
By Jason McDonald, Ph.D.
Keywords are the Foundation of SEO
Keywords are the foundation of good search engine optimization (SEO). Why? Because Google, Yahoo, and Bing all live in a "push" medium. Nothing happens until, and unless, your potential customer enters a search query. So that search query lives first in his or her head. Search relies on us to "pull" the information out of the search engine.
That's why the most important first step in an effective SEO strategy is to determine your customer keywords. Build your keyword list from your customer's perspective, not your own. Use the free keyword tools. But how do you organize your keywords? How do you prevent keyword overload? Or keyword chaos? There can seem to be so many keywords!
This blog post discusses organizing your keywords into a keyword worksheet built upon a foundation of keyword families, which are core keywords plus helper keywords. Here we go.
Organizing Your Keywords (Concepts)
Think of keyword searches as if they are the "search poetry" in the heads of your customers. Just like poems, the choice of words is not random. Rather, words organize themselves into clusters of keywords, which I call keyword families. In this example, we are working with a client who runs a skin care clinic in San Leandro, California. So working with her, the keyword tools, and our own brainstorming, we begin to see certain keyword patterns - based on:
- Core Keywords - her most basic keywords searched for by her customers. A search really can't exist without one of these keywords (defining search as a priority search that is likely to be a potential customer). Her core keywords are:
- Skin Care
- Esthetician
- Cosmetologist
- Helper Keywords - other keywords that a potential customer adds on to the core keywords to create an actual query. Geographic terms (such as Oakland, San Leandro, East Bay, etc.) are very common helper keywords. But there are others as well, in this case terms like "clinic" or "specialist" Helper Keywords should also be grouped into categories. Geographic is a common one; in this example, we also have treatments for the types of treatments offered, plus a category called other for keywords like specialist or clinic that a searcher might add as in Skin Care Clinic Oakland.
- Geographic Helper Keywords
- Oakland
- San Leandro
- San Lorenzo
- Treatment Helper Keywords
- Facials
- Chemical Peels
- Skin Peels
- Acne Treatment
- Other
A Sample SEO Keyword Worksheet
The concepts are one thing, and the real keyword worksheet is another. So as I work on a project, I take the concepts and build out a real keyword worksheet, based on core keywords and below that helper keywords. Then I build out Representative Search Queries, and as I do those I usually log the search volumes especially for the core keywords to get an idea of which search queries are the highest volume and most valuable (vs. my client's unique value offer). Finally, as I do and redo the target searches, I am on the lookout for competitors - I add those to a column on the right of the keyword worksheet. Why? Because I continually reverse engineer the keyword strategies of competitors (by viewing source to their HTML, looking at their website structure etc.) and ultimately I check out their incoming links via the link tools like Yahoo Site Explorer.
Here's a link to the Keyword Worksheet for this project, which you can download in Microsoft Excel format.
Real-world SEO Example: Skin Care Specialist San Leandro, CA
So in our real-world example, we can see that for a (non-dermatologist) skin care esthetician in San Leandro, California, the highest volume searches occur for skin care, esthetician and cosmetologist in that order. We have to work with the client to prioritize her keywords. It's not just about search volume, after all, it's about that special spot where the highest volume customer searches connect with her unique value proposition. What are some of her unique value propositions?
Well, first of all, there's locality. She is located in San Leandro, California, and most people want and need a skin care professional that is geographically close to them. Therefore searchers use geographic terms like "Oakland" or "San Leandro." That might not seem that unique, but that is a critical element to her SEO strategy: build her web pages with lots of geographic terms, so that she scores well on Google searches that contain local communities. Similarly, getting posted to Google Local and Yelp are clearly going to be important. Second, some of the procedures that she specializes in such as Acne Treatment are going to be important, and we will need to build out landing pages that reference her major target areas such as acne treatment, microdermabrasion, and Rosacea treatment. Third, she has found traction with the special needs of ethnic groups, and so some pages are in order that cater to the search queries for special skin types such as those of African Americans and Asians.
As we build out her website, therefore, these keyword families will be the foundation of her website organization and the on page factors of each and every page. She'll have a website section on procedures, one on the special needs of ethnic groups, and throughout we will emphasize the cities around her that are used by potential customers in her searches. The three linguistic foundations of her website will be: skin care, esthetician and cosmetologist.
Whether it's skin care or your unique business, the keyword worksheet is a primary tool to organize your keyword strategy around the core keywords plus helpers, measured by the search volumes and the intersection of those search queries with the unique value proposition of your business. And don't forget to list key competitors as they are useful for reverse engineering on page and off page (link) strategies.
Good luck!
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