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Many businesses recognize that search engines can bring volumes
of highly targeted prospects to their website, typically at a
fraction of the cost of traditional marketing. Unfortunately,
these same companies often overlook the most important part of
their search engine marketing campaigns, which is keyphrase
selection and evaluation.
Keyphrases (those phrases that potential customers are using to
find products or services on search engines) are the building
block of any search engine marketing strategy.
It is essential that they are chosen carefully, or else the
remainder of the campaign, no matter how effective the
implementation, will likely be in vain. What follows is a
three-step process that goes over the process of compiling,
selecting, and evaluating the ongoing performance of keyphrases
for search engines.
1. Compiling a keyphrase list:
Usually, companies are sure that they already know their ideal
keyphrases. Often, they are wrong.
This is typically because it is very hard to separate oneself
from a business and look at it from the perspective of a
potential customer (rather than an insider). Compiling a
keyphrase list should not be, despite common practice, a
strictly internal process.
Rather, it is best to ask everyone outside of your company for
their input, especially your customers. People are often very
surprised at the keyphrase suggestions they get- and sometimes
dismayed to realize that an average customer doesn't speak the
same language that they do.
Only after you have put together a list of likely phrases from
external sources do you add your own. As a last step, try to add
variations, plurals, and derivatives of the phrases on your list.
2. Evaluating keyphrases:
Once you have compiled a master keyphrase list, it is time to
evaluate each phrase to hone your list down to those most likely
to bring you the highest amount of quality traffic.
Although many individuals will base their assessment of
keyphrase value based only on popularity figures, there are
really three vitally important aspects of each phrase to
consider.
a) Popularity
By far the easiest of the three to judge is popularity, since it
is not subjective. Software like WordTracker gives popularity
figures of search phrases based upon actual search engine
activity (it also gives additional keyphrase suggestions and
variations).
Such tools allow you to assign a concrete popularity number to
each phrase to use when comparing them. Obviously, the higher
the number, the more traffic that can be expected (assuming you
are able to obtain good search engine positions).
However, this number alone is not good enough reason to pursue
any particular keyphrase, although keyphrase analysis too often
stops here.
b) Specificity
This is more abstract than the sheer popularity number, but
equally important. For example, let's assume that you were able
to obtain great rankings for the keyphrase "insurance companies"
(a daunting prospect). Let's also assume that you only deal with
auto insurance.
Although "insurance companies" might have a much higher
popularity figure than "auto insurance companies", the first
keyphrase would also be comprised of people looking for life
insurance, health insurance, and home insurance.
It is very likely that someone searching for a particular type
of insurance will refine their search after seeing the disparate
results returned from the phrase "insurance companies".
In the second, longer keyphrase, you can be reasonably sure that
a much higher percentage of visitors will be looking for what
you offer- and the addition of the word "auto" will make it much
easier to attain higher rankings, since the longer term will be
less competitive.
c) Motivation of User
This factor, even more abstract than specificity, calls for an
attempt to understand the motivation of a search engine user by
simply analyzing his or her search phrase.
Assume, for example, that you were a real estate agent in
Atlanta. Two of the keyphrases you are evaluating are "Atlanta
real estate listings" and "Atlanta real estate agents".
Both phrases have very similar popularity numbers. They are also
each fairly specific, and your services are very relevant to
each. So which phrase is better? If you look into the likely
motivation of the user, you will probably conclude that the
second is superior.
While both phrases target people looking for real estate in
Atlanta, you can infer from the second phrase that the searcher
has moved beyond the point where they are browsing local homes
or checking out prices in their neighborhood- they are looking
for an agent, which implies that they are ready to act. Often,
subtle distinctions between terms can make a large difference on
the quality of the traffic they attract.
3. Evaluating Keyphrase Performance:
Until recently, judging the performance of individual keyphrases
was a dicey proposition. Although it is possible to tell from
your log traffic analysis how many visitors are getting to your
site from each keyphrase (valuable information, but
unfortunately not enough to do much with), it was very hard to
decipher which phrases were bringing you the most quality
traffic.
Recently, however, some sophisticated but affordable tools have
been developed that allow you to judge the performance of each
individual keyphrase based upon visitor behavior.
This new software makes it possible to periodically analyze
which keyphrases are bringing your site the most valuable
visitors- those who buy your products, fill out your contact
form, download your demo, etc.
This type of data, rather than the sheer number of visitors from
each search phrase alone, is invaluable when you are refining
your search engine marketing campaigns, since you can discard
and replace non-performing keyphrases and put increased effort
toward the phrases that are delivering visitors that become
customers. This kind of ongoing analysis is the final piece of
the keyphrase puzzle, and allows you to continually target the
most important phrases for your industry, even if they change
over time.
Conclusion:
Keyphrase compilation, evaluation, and performance are all
vitally important to any search engine marketing campaign. While
high rankings in search engines are an admirable goal, high
rankings for poor keyphrases will consistently deliver poor
results.
Integration of this keyphrase process into your overall search
engine marketing strategy can dramatically improve your website
performance (and thus your bottom line).
About the author:
http://homebusiness.kim-lar.com
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