Archive for the ‘Keyword Research’ Category

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This is part 12 of a 12 part series on keyword research. This series will guide you through four distinct phase of the keyword research process, providing you step by step guidelines to help you gather, sort and organize your keywords into an effective marketing campaign.

Yesterday, as we begun the fourth and final stage of the keyword research process, we looked at several ways to analyze your website and segment keywords into groups based on user intent. Today we’ll wrap up the entire research process, and this series, by outlining the final act of keyword grouping. Often times even your segmented keyword lists can be quite extensive and it’ll be important to group these phrases even further in order to be properly optimized into the website. This ensures that each page optimized maintains a tight focus but still able to be optimized for a significant group of keywords.

Grouping phrases together for on-page targeting

The process of organizing your keywords is similar to the process of splitting a single core term into multiple cores, only its done in a much more fine-tuned scale. With core terms you were dealing with multiple themes, or different ways to search for the same product. In this phase we are working with only a single core term and deciding how to segment literally hundreds of phrases into manageable groups that are similar in nature.

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This is part 11 of a 12 part series on keyword research. This series will guide you through four distinct phase of the keyword research process, providing you step by step guidelines to help you gather, sort and organize your keywords into an effective marketing campaign.

Phase IV: Organizing Keywords for Success

Making SEO Successful

Organizing your keywords into an effective marketing strategy is the most important of the four phases of keyword research outlined in this document. While most often SEOs and keyword researchers focus on the research phases, organizing your keyword properly can truly help you create a vastly more successful optimization and marketing campaign.

Let’s use the analogy of building an engine to help us understand the value in this final step in the process.

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This is part 10 of a 12 part series on keyword research. This series will guide you through four distinct phase of the keyword research process, providing you step by step guidelines to help you gather, sort and organize your keywords into an effective marketing campaign.

Analyzing Phrases for Quality

As we began Phase III of our keyword research process we discussed several different aspects of analyzing phrases. This helped us better understand the value of each phrase and the pros and cons that each bring to the table. Each of these much be considered and weighed carefully when determining if a keyword is valuable or not.

All of the above noted elements are pretty cut-and-dry and fairly easy to analyze. But in addition to those there are also some more vague elements that must be duly considered as well. These additional elements are far more subjective and require a good deal of thought and analysis.

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This is part 9 of a 12 part series on keyword research. This series will guide you through four distinct phase of the keyword research process, providing you step by step guidelines to help you gather, sort and organize your keywords into an effective marketing campaign.

Yesterday we began Phase III of the keyword research process discussing several elements of key phrase analyzation. We’ll continue today looking at a few more considerations when determining how valuable any particular search phrase is.

Phrases that convert

As you sort through your lists of keywords, you want to be sure to eliminate phrases that won’t deliver converting traffic. Whatever keywords that you keep for optimization, you want each to be able to drive the most qualified traffic, giving you visitors that are most likely to buy your product or services. Many search terms, if ranked high, can generate tons of traffic, however any term does not directly apply to your site or what you offer, should be scrapped.

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This is part 7 of a 12 part series on keyword research. This series will guide you through four distinct phase of the keyword research process, providing you step by step guidelines to help you gather, sort and organize your keywords into an effective marketing campaign.

How to find search phrases

I’ll continue where I left off last week, looking at the different factors involved in finding relevant search phrases. You’ll remember that we discussed the first three; Time, research and deletion. The fourth factor is a bit more involved and it has to do with analyzing the phrases in a bit more detail.

The split / combo factor

Depending on your keywords, a search for any particular core term may produce results ranging from 0 to 1000 different keyword search phrases. Obviously if it produces zero then that core term can likely be scrubbed, or maybe set aside for a day if/when it gains in search popularity. If you’ve broken down your core terms correctly you will usually get a list between 10-300 keyword phrases returned, but again, this varies by industry and term. In the real world, things don’t always work out like we hope.

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This is part 6 of a 12 part series on keyword research. This series will guide you through four distinct phase of the keyword research process, providing you step by step guidelines to help you gather, sort and organize your keywords into an effective marketing campaign.

Phase II

What is a search phrase?

Before we go any further, let’s discuss the difference between a core term and a search phrase. For the purpose of this document a core term and search phrase are similar in that both will be searched and both can provide potential traffic to your site. Core terms, represent a broader topic while the search phrases are simply core terms with added qualifiers, therefore representing a narrower focus. Both core terms and search phrases will be optimized into your website to drive traffic and hopefully, be instrumental in generating strong conversion rates.

In the research process each core term will be used to uncover dozens, if not hundreds of search phrases which collectively will bring in the bulk of your targeted traffic.

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This is part 5 of a 12 part series on keyword research. This series will guide you through four distinct phase of the keyword research process, providing you step by step guidelines to help you gather, sort and organize your keywords into an effective marketing campaign.

Four factors of core term prioritization

By now you should have several dozen or more core terms documented on your spreadsheet. The question is, what to do with all of these keywords. Before moving on to Phase II you’ll first need to prioritize your core terms a bit. In the next phase you’ll start digging deeper into each core term to find the relevant search phrases it produces. Instead of taking the shotgun approach, you can go at deliberately, starting the the core terms that provide you with the best opportunities and will have a more immediate impact on your optimization campaign.

There are four different factors that you need to analyze in determining the relative importance of each core term:

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This is part 4 of a 12 part series on keyword research. This series will guide you through four distinct phase of the keyword research process, providing you step by step guidelines to help you gather, sort and organize your keywords into an effective marketing campaign.

Yesterday I discussed three steps in finding core terms: looking through your website, brainstorming, and then scouring your competitors’ websites. These three steps can give you a wealth of information and you’ll uncover some very important core terms. If you missed yesterday’s post, that quickie recap above doesn’t do it justice so be sure to go back and read. Today I’ll finish up with the steps in core term research before concluding phase one of our keyword research process tomorrow.

Step 4: Use keyword research tools

Site owners often begin the research process by first going to the available tools. There are numerous keyword research tools available and it really doesn’t matter which tool or tools you use, so long as you’re getting the results you need. Since every tool is slightly different it’s a good idea to use multiple tools to ensure you’re getting a wide range of data.

But you can’t really use these tools effectively–or to their fullest potential–until you have some information in which to actually research out, which we’ve covered int he first three steps of core term research. In this step we want to take core terms that we’ve already discovered and plug them into the tools to help us find core terms that have still remained elusive.

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This is part 3 of a 12 part series on keyword research. This series will guide you through four distinct phase of the keyword research process, providing you step by step guidelines to help you gather, sort and organize your keywords into an effective marketing campaign.

How to Find Core Terms

In Part II of this series we defined what a core term is. Today I’ll show you the research steps involved in finding good, strong core terms that will be the basis for the rest of our research, and provide us some actionable intelligence that will be used throughout the keyword research process.

It’s very important that during this core term discovery phase that you don’t give up too early. There is never a point where you have too many core terms or “enough” to work with. To stop researching before you have uncovered just about every possible core term can leave you handicapped in not only the rest of your research, but also in the success of your optimization efforts.

I should also point out that keyword research isn’t a one-time process. No matter how hard you try to be as thorough as possible, you simply won’t uncover everything right now. That’s OK. As time goes on and new core terms come to mind, or search patterns change, continue to add these new core term ideas to your lists to be researched and optimized in the proper time.

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This is part 2 of a 12 part series on keyword research. This series will guide you through four distinct phase of the keyword research process, providing you step by step guidelines to help you gather, sort and organize your keywords into an effective marketing campaign.

Phase I: Finding Core Terms

When most people start with the task of researching keywords they often start by looking for keywords they are familiar with. They’ll use their familiarity with their products or services to find new word variations, maybe a few new relevant words, or even learn some new ways of phrasing what it is people are looking for. While this approach provides valuable information to the researcher, it’s somewhat disorganized.

Because keyword research is so crucial, a more organized approach to it is essential. Instead of starting the research process looking for words you essentially already know but are just in an unknown order, you must start the process looking for what is unknown. In order to find those unknown phrases, you have to start with a foundation that will guide you from where you are to what it is that you’re trying to find, a list of keywords that can be optimized into your site.

The keyword research process starts not looking for search phrases, but core terms that are the foundation of what your site, or specific pages of your site, is all about. Let’s start by defining what a core term is.

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