Keyword research is a fundamental part of online marketing of all kinds- if you don’t use the words people are actually interested in and actively searching for, you’re missing a lot of traffic. Helene Hall, director of search at Gravytrain provides a 5 step guide to keyword research.
Keyword research is the foundation of any good SEO campaign, and with increasing focus on natural optimisation, this is growing in importance every day. While engaging content is key, along with a good core site structure, aesthetically pleasing website and a good user experience, keywords are the foundation that should underpin everything we do.
Keyword research is the foundation of SEO
Keyword research is time consuming, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. Below are five simple steps to ensure that you are on-course to create the best SEO campaign possible.
Build the right foundation
It may be tempting to start doing SEO without carrying out an in-depth keyword research phase but this can be one of the biggest mistakes that people make, especially as the search terms are the basis for all our SEO work going forward.
There will, I am sure, be some instances where clients are too heavily focused on one or two keywords, and often these are highly competitive. This should then involve a little re-education to show the benefit of targeting keyword groups to support an overall competitive keyword term.
Using Keyword Groups or supporting keywords
Optimising and including keywords which support an overall high volume and broad keyword can achieve the same goal, but with far less competition and more ease. For example, ranking for “best architect in Surrey 2013” will be much easier to achieve than “architect” or “best architect” but they all work together to optimise for the head terms and can show success along the way to achieving your main goal.
Perhaps we should call it ‘keyword investigation’ as the process is about first defining your broad topic and brainstorming based on your clients’ business, products and goals i.e. traffic, conversion etc. to funnel down into the specifics.
Get focused!
Treat it as if you are initiating a sales call and you are trying to identify whether this potential customer is wasting your time or not. You increase the chance of a sale by using qualifiers. In the sales world it’s the four W’s – Who, What, When, Where – but relating it to search these still apply:
Take it to the Tools
Once you have brainstormed with the broad and targeted keyword areas along with the qualifiers, this is when you can take it to the keyword tools. There are obviously many tools available and everyone has their own personal favourites, but I think the most effective include Adwords Keyword tool, Keyword Spy and Ubersuggest which uses Google’s autocomplete data to suggest keywords.
Once you have gathered your extensive list you can then put them into the Adwords Keyword Tool which will allow you to fine tune the results.
Top Tip: Make sure you use “exact” match searches and set your target country along with focusing on Local Monthly searches.
Make your case
You want to choose keywords with a good level of search volume but with lower competition levels. You can get a grasp on the competitiveness by looking at the Adwords Keyword tool but don’t trust this metric too much as this is only for PPC queries and not organic.
When trying to find out how hard it will be for a client to rank for the chosen terms, it can be useful to start by running a few manual search queries on the terms to see what the competition is like. Simply searching on Google for a few terms, taking down the top competitors and collecting their URL’s to take into Moz’s opensiteexplorer comparison tool (OSE) can be a good start.
Look at the competitor’s source code to see:
– Title tag – what terms they are targeting and how optimised is the site.
– H tags,
– Meta data
After reviewing in OSE go back to the competitor’s sites and run queries to look at the following:
– Inbound anchor text
– Social presence – how active, what level of quality?
– What kind of content does the site have – can we do better?
– How optimised is the content?
– What does the site architecture shout?
Top Tip: Look for the easiest competitor to beat. If it’s on the first page and isn’t well optimised, doesn’t have a good page or domain authority, social is minimal, content it’s a great sign!
Keep in mind your head terms, supporting keywords, qualifying terms and with the latest insight into the search competition you can plan your strategy:
– Which keywords can achieve quick wins?
– Which keywords have the highest search volume and will be supported by other terms where you can more easily achieve success?
– What longer tail content are people searching for that you can create?
By following these tips you can build a robust SEO campaign that can form the foundation of a highly optimised website, and all search activity going forward.
By Helene Hall
Director of search
Gravytrain
http://www.gravytrain.co.uk/
