Quite often I’m asked how to select key words for a website, what are the best tools to select keywords? There is no simple short answer to this question, whilst many people will point you in the direction of a key word tool or two.
Spending a bit more time and effort into selecting keywords will pay off in the long run, if you can select effective key words from the beginning and build on them, instead of quickly brainstorming a few associated phrases and find out in 6 months time they haven’t been effective you’ll save time and money.
So let’s start at the beginning, the first step I always take is open up an excel sheet with your website in the first column followed by 5 competitor websites that rank highly. Use a combination of ad words keyword tool and a key word density reporting tool any will do that gives you a full density report. In ad words keyword tool use the ‘website content’ tab and enter your competitors URL (preferably the homepage), sort the results by local search volume for the last month and copy the top 10 results that have the highest search volume onto your spreadsheet under that competitors column. The next step is to visit the competitors’ website itself and run keyword density reports with the SEO Quake add on for Firefox. Take note of the top 10 two phrase terms copy them into your spreadsheet removing any duplicates. So what have you just done? You’ve managed to create a platform of keywords to choose from that your competitors are using and more importantly look for new variations of these keywords.
Before we look at highlighting keyword opportunities, let’s take a couple of steps back and justify why I didn’t use the advertiser competition bar when looking at keywords in the ad words tool. The advertiser competition bar is specifically for ad words and measuring the competitiveness for a term in ad words. Whilst PPC and SEO are related I like to keep this separate and try to determine how competitive a term is using my own methods. Also remember that Google is a big money making machine and they will try many tactics to make you select terms that make them money. As we know SEO tends to yield a better click through rate and more valued customer. I have an ad words campaign I run using a selected keyword ‘motorised tie racks’ the site itself ranks 2nd for this term and generates a greater click through rate than that of the ad words campaign. I have found this across many of my campaigns which is why I use this method instead of letting the advertiser competition bar put me off selecting a keyword.
Now that we have established Google are out for your money (big shock), we can move onto to using another one of their free tools (irony intended). Using Google insights to look for rising search terms associated with your main keyword you can look for keyword terms that are becoming increasingly popular. Now you have got a list of terms to work from, insert a column to the right hand side of your keywords and add rising search terms next to them, as these search terms are less competitive but are becoming more popular they should be easier to obtain a ranking for. This was a nice and simple step to find some quick variations. Another method of looking for opportunities is to go back and use the ad words tool again looking at terms that are specific to your website that don’t appear on your competitors list of keywords and add them to your list. By now you should have a nice big list of keywords to choose from, now let’s not go gung ho on these keywords, this is the research part done and dusted, next is to analyse them.
Analysing your keywords can be a difficult task; the best method for me has been to use ad words. Whilst I mentioned you can’t really measure equivalent competiveness between ad words phrases and SEO keywords you can get an idea of search volume. Now you have these key phrases and hopefully have targeted your content and Meta data around these terms, your PPC text ad’s will stand a better chance of getting a higher quality score and becoming a quality text ad. Set all your PPC campaigns up using a different ad group for each keyword with one active text ad using the keyword as your headline and adding the just the one keyword in the keywords list using a combination of both phrase and exact type matches. Run this ad words campaign for a couple of weeks and monitor the cost on a daily basis, just to ensure you’re not spending ridiculous amount of money, simply pause any keywords you feel are costing you too much more than likely these will be popular key terms and will ultimately be used in your final selection. After a couple of weeks the only bit of information we are going to look at is the impressions tab how many times your ad has appeared, select your keywords tab and sort by impressions there you go select about 10 of those top terms and use them for your main keywords. Refer back to your spreadsheet looking at the keyword opportunities and rising search terms to see if any of those are worth adding to your final list.
If you need any help with your keyword selection of other SEO advice feel free to get in touch at Core Design.