Aug
22
Keyword Research For SEO
Filed Under Organic SEO | 1 Comment
So, you have a website you want to promote, a service (or product) you want to sell, and you want people to see it. There are many ways to drive traffic to your site: sponsored ads, PPC advertising, search engine optimization (SEO), social network advertising and more. In the following articles, we will explain what role does keyword research play in those, and why is it important to invest in keyword research for SEO, PPC and more. Some of you may already have experience with Internet Marking, and know the basic usages of keywords, for example in AdWords campaigns. If that’s the case, this series of articles was specially written for you, since many people neglect the importance of proper and deep keyword research, after they manage to accomplish limited results with the common, easy to get keywords out there.
Article Number 1 – Keyword Research For SEO
This article is about SEO – the promotion of sites for organic search engine traffic. We will mainly focus on Google as the biggest search engine, and discuss the importance of keyword research for site structure, supporting content pages and promotion strategy. You are building a site, or already have a site you want to promote. You need to pick the keywords that are relevant for your site. Your content should be build around those keywords, and then your site must be promoted with these words for best results. You might say “Yeah, I know this stuff; I’ll choose the keywords that have low competition, and relevant traffic, and go for those”. Is it really that simple? A proper site that is targeted for organic traffic usually has three kinds of pages: 1) Money, or conversion pages – those are the pages you need traffic for. 2) Supporting content pages – those add more content to your site, cover more subjects, and help you promote your main pages. Those pages are very important for deep linking, a technique that will be discussed in detail in future articles. 3) Technical pages – privacy policy, terms and conditions, etc. We will ignore the third part – although those are required to show professionalism both to users and search engines, they are a minor factor in content optimization. So your site has content pages beside the main. Each one of those pages is evaluated by Google (and other search engines) to determine the core keywords of its content separately. Each of these pages has its own “subject” in the eyes of Google based on those keywords. As SEO specialists already know, Google SERPs now are affected by the related relevancy of pages, then by Page Rank. So inner links, and all of your site’s traffic flow structure, now depends much more on the defining keywords of your pages, rather than on their “raw” linking power. Let’s look at an example: you sell books. You’ve build a site about books, with five content pages, one of them your main. The main page talks about books, the second one is a help center with most questions about shipping, customers write reviews on the third, the fourth explains about your affiliate program, and the final page discusses news, mainly quoting different authors and publishers. So your pages have the following main keywords (respectively to the pages): books, shipping, reviews, affiliate, and authors. Assuming you advertisement plan centers on “books” as your core keyword for SEO, this means that you site has in fact only one content page – the main page! The rest of the pages will lose a lot of their linking value for your inner links, and trying to deep link them for SEO will prove very inefficient. Is there anything to do about it? After all, help center must cover shipping, and you do want an affiliate program. To solve this problem you need proper keyword research. You have to find keywords, that are highly relevant to “books”, yet can be used for your non-book related pages. The simplest example is replacing the word “reviews” with “book reviews”, which is a long tail of “books”, and thus highly relevant. Such a change won’t compromise the content of the page, but would work wonders for its SEO value to the site. At this point you may think I am stating the obvious, yet you have to remember your initial plan: “find relevant keywords with low competition”. Thus, “first guess” keywords such as “book reviews” will prove to be quite competitive, and therefore problematic. Relying on Google Trends or free keyword research tools won’t solve your problem. In reality, those tools only make it harder for you. Every well known free tool is widely used by all of your competitors. Thus the amount of competition on the words they’ll get you will still be high, and they only take away possible combinations, by exposing them to you competitors. “Well”, you say “there is no working around Google’s keyword tools. After all, the statistics Google provides are the actual search values!” And this is where most of the people fall. NO, keyword research DOESN’T end with the actual search values. Let’s think for a moment: what those values actually tell us? It’s the number of people that typed the keyword in the search box. So those are the keywords we want to rank on. But in reality, there are orders of magnitude more keywords on every subject. Do you think Google is blind about them? No, people just don’t usually type them. But they are still listed by Google as keywords relevant to the subject. Besides, each one of them has its own web of connections to other keywords, regarding the linking power it has for them. Thus a page with content regarding them, can still link to another page, regarding the keywords that do appear in the search values. In the end the link quality will be high. Not only that, because those keywords don’t appear in free online tools, and have no search value, they have virtually no competition. Thus you can buy links and promote them for next to nothing. Keyword X is your main keywords, this is where you sell. Keywords Y and Z are relevant to it. But while Y has search value, Z does not. So you write a content page about Y, it may give you some extra traffic, but competing for it will be hard. On the other hand, a content page for Z won’t have competition. You can link to it from sites relevant to Z, because they are few and weak (maybe even amateur), and will easily agree to your offers. They won’t be a lot of value, but they won’t cost you. You can get listed in directories on pages with very few other listings. Eventually your page will rank top for Z. This won’t give you traffic, but the link from your Z page to you main, X page, will promote X on the Search Engine. And that’s not the end. Your overall domain will be considered by Google to have more relevant, high ranking content. The time it will take you to promote a single “Y”, will allow you to promote ten, and sometimes even a hundred “Z’s”. One hundred relevant content pages, with high rank but low traffic of only ten visitors per day, will contribute to your site more than one relevant content page, with medium traffic of one thousand visitors per day (if your secondary keywords are promoted for high traffic, and getting tens of thousands of visitors, then you should either rethink your site hierarchy, or be very rich by now). Remember, Google and Alexa are not the same. Content is what Google cares about above anything else. The more content you have – the better. But the power of your content must also be utilized correctly or it will be wasted. The only way to do so is to have it rank high. Then Google will think your page relevant, and its linking power will improve. In summary: While search values are key to deciding on you main selling keywords, their virtue fades regarding supporting (secondary) keywords and content pages. Free keyword tools, yet alone Google Trends, are not sufficient for keyword research. Relying on them is a sure way for head on competition, which is inefficient and resource wasteful in the long run. It is better to invest in content mass of many content rich pages, ranking high for low competition keywords. The page that should get traffic is you main, or conversion, page. Supporting pages are not for traffic, they serve to promote your main page. Wasting time, money and effort to promote them, is opposite to their objective. It’s much better to invest in a proper keyword research beforehand. Next time – Why invest in keyword research for PPC. 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Great article, I’ve learned a lot of it.