SEO Keyword Research and Selection Process

The English language is incredible. There are hundreds of different word combinations that can be used to communicate a single idea. And every combination is a possible SEO keyword phrase for some website. Maybe yours.

So how do you decide which words and phrases to use when you’re optimizing your website to increase search engine traffic? Do you choose the keywords with the highest search volume? The ones that you’re already using on your site? Do you pick keywords with the least competition?

All of these questions must be addressed through the course of developing a comprehensive SEO plan. But for a small business website, one question rises above the rest: Which search terms are your customers using?

SEO Keyword Choices

Putting together a proper SEO plan requires making sensible decisions about which keywords you’ll target and which ones you’ll ignore. Sounds easy, right?

Not so quick. As you conduct keyword research and start developing your ideas for an SEO plan, you’ll be faced with infinite choices regarding which keywords you should include in your SEO campaign. Many (too many) website managers make their decisions in a rash manner, often without giving any consideration to why one keyword might be a better choice over another.

I’ve actually witnessed small business owners and bloggers tackle the decision-making process in an arbitrary, freewheeling manner. So I thought I’d put together an article that addresses some of the considerations that should be involved in making choices among all of your keyword options. And chances are, you’ll have a lot of options.

Synonyms

A synonym is a word that has the exact same meaning as some other word. If you want to find synonyms galore, just open a thesaurus (or visit an online thesaurus). Look up the word buy and you’ll find out that one of its synonyms is purchase. This raises the question: Should you optimize your site with the word buy or with the word purchase? You’ll find that the synonym dilemma arises for every single SEO project. The ongoing challenge in the keyword selection process often involves deciding between synonyms and synonymous phrases.

Search Volume

Search volume refers to the number of searches a term receives in a given time period. For example, the word buy was searched about 68 million times on Google in January. Purchase only received about 6.1 million searches. Still, that’s a lot. A knee-jerk reaction might be to decide that you’ll use the word buy in your SEO because it gets more searches. But there are many cases in which it’s much better to target a keyword with a lower search volume (although you don’t want to go too low!).

Competition

If buy gets more searches than purchase, then more people probably use the word buy. Therefore, it will probably have greater competition, which means you have to work harder (publish more content, obtain more links) to see results. That’s something to think about. Maybe you could optimize for purchase and get a big chunk of the 6.1 million searchers within a few months whereas you could spend a year optimizing for buy and never see a single visitor as a result of your efforts. Don’t worry about which keywords get the most searches. Worry about which keywords will draw your customers and which ones will realistically lead to success.

Customers

The best way to start narrowing down your list of synonyms is to determine which words your customers use when referring to your products. For example, many musicians refer to their recorded music as “records.” They’ll say something like “We made the record for our fans.” But fans don’t search for records. They don’t buy or purchase records. So records are not what music lovers are looking for. The fans — the customers — the searchers — are looking for music. They want to buy or purchase music. Or songs.

Existing Keyword Traffic

Let’s say you sell music on your website. Should you optimize for purchase music or buy music? If you find that you’re already drawing a few visitors every month for the term purchase music but you’ve never drawn a single visitor for the term buy music, then you might be better off working on the former term. Whenever possible, leverage keywords that are already drawing traffic! For example, if purchase music brought in five visitors and you find your site ranked on page 35 of the search engine results pages, you should optimize and try to move up a few pages. Then, you should keep optimizing and try to move up a lot more pages.

Writer-Friendly

Some potential keywords and phrases don’t lend themselves to written content. This includes odd phrases that people will enter in search engines but that they wouldn’t normally say or write while communicating with other people. It also includes keywords that are misspelled (many searchers misspell their search terms). Keep in mind that when you finish your research and finalize your keyword selections, they will have to be implemented on your website, which means they will be written into the text. If you want the language on your site to be readable and correct, then you want to choose writer-friendly keywords.

Narrow the Search

Let’s face it, there’s a whole lot of music out there. You can get more specific about which music you’re selling. If you’re a full-service music store, you’d do well to choose a bunch of keywords with each one targeting a different genre or artist. You could optimize for purchase rock music or purchase pop music. Sometimes you’ll see better results optimizing for a larger pool of keywords that are highly specific and that have less competition.

Long-Tail Keywords

How specific can you get? I already mentioned artists and genres. What about format? Do you sell music downloads? Maybe instead of purchase rock music you should optimize for download rock music. As you add more words to your keyword phrase, it becomes a long-tail keyword, which is simply a keyword that consist of several words. These can be effective when used thoughtfully.

SEO is About Asking the Right Questions

When you start compiling a list of possible keywords, your head might spin. It’s truly mind-boggling how many words and phrases can be used to search for one product or service. As you go through your list of keyword possibilities, avoid making arbitrary or meaningless selections as much as possible. Try to cite a reason for every decision you make. If you eliminate a keyword from the list, make sure you have a reason why.

As you go through the process, asking the right questions is essential to informing your decisions. Think about each keyword and determine how many ways that term might be used by people searching for it. Are they more likely to be looking for your offering or is it possible the search term is even more applicable to something you don’t sell at all:

• If I optimize for download rock music, I might draw searchers who are looking for free downloads.
• If I optimize for purchase rock music, I might get visitors looking to buy sheet music or CDs.
• Should I optimize for buy rock songs online?

Sometimes you end up back at square one, and you have to go back and do more research. But it’s worth it. If you’re going to invest in a serious SEO campaign, you want to get the research and keyword selection right the first time.

Here’s a summary of considerations to keep in mind when making SEO keyword selections:

• Synonyms: Do you have a nice, long list of keyword possibilities to choose from?
• Search Volume: How many searches are conducted for each of the potential keywords?
• Competition: Which keywords are highly competitive in the SEO field?
• Customers: Which keywords do your customers use when looking for your products and services?
• Existing Keyword Traffic: Are you already seeing low volumes of traffic for some of these keywords?
• Writer Friendly: Lean toward keywords that are correctly spelled and fit naturally into written communications.
• Narrow the Search: To attract customers looking for exactly what you offer, narrow your language. Be specific.
• Long-tail Keywords: Be more specific. Use a larger number of keywords that have lower search volumes and less competition.
• Finally: Ask the right questions. Make sure you have a reason for each elimination or selection from your list.

SEO is a tedious process, especially the research and keyword selection phases. But once you get past the nitty-gritty grind of poring over lists of words, phrases, and statistics, you get to move to the next step: keyword implementation. And that’s when SEO gets fun.

Scribizzy offers a full suite of SEO services and can help you through any phase of your SEO campaign. Get a quote online.

SEO Starts with Keyword Research

Whenever I’m working on a website copywriting project, I ask my client to fill out a questionnaire that helps me understand their business. This enables me to write copy that truly represents the client’s company, mission, and goals.

One of the items on the questionnaire used to be “Please list any keywords related to your website or business.”

I quickly found out that very few small business owners understood what I meant by “keywords.”  Sometimes, they would jot down something like “use your best judgment.” Usually, they’d list a few keywords, but it was clear that they weren’t researched keywords for SEO. They were simply words and phrases that represented the products and services that the client offered, and they had been selected at random.

Since most small business owners don’t specialize in web content and design, how could they be expected to know that when a web content specialist inquires about keywords, she means keywords that have been researched for SEO purposes?

Entrepreneurs understand business. They are concerned with their industry, profit margins, customers, sales, and ROIs. They know that establishing an online presence is essential to business, but they do not usually realize the complexities involved in developing an effective web presence. For many small businesses, getting online merely involves building a website. So it’s up to web content specialists to educate small business owners. That doesn’t mean selling them products or services they don’t need (and many small businesses do not need keywords or SEO), but it does mean helping them be more informed about their options.

It wasn’t long before I changed my questionnaire to read “Have you conducted any SEO keyword research?” Rewording the question had some interesting results. Some clients simply put “no.” Others became curious: What do you mean by keyword research?

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing is an online marketing strategy that grows traffic to a website by increasing its visibility on search engines. This is primarily done through search engine optimization (SEO).

This is easier said than done. Search engine marketing is extremely competitive. Most small business owners think that by simply launching a website, they’ll automatically start getting traffic through search engines. But these days, to get traffic through search engines, you have to carefully optimize your website. That means researching and choosing keywords, implementing those keywords, establishing incoming links, and monitoring keyword and traffic performance.

Search engine marketing isn’t for everyone. If you’re on a tight budget in a field with highly congested keywords, you would be better off with an alternative online marketing strategy. There are lots of ways to draw traffic, and before you start an SEO campaign, you should do your research and make sure it’s a good match for your business.

Keyword Research

You can’t just pluck keywords out of nowhere. Well you can, but your results will be less than ideal. Keyword research can be a tedious process. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of possible keywords for just about any search term you can think of. When you conduct keyword research in preparation of optimizing your site, your goal is to find the keywords that will draw the most traffic. You also want the traffic to be targeted to your business offerings.

Let’s say you run a small, independent bookstore. You might think that a good keyword to pursue would be “books.” But that would be wrong. To gain traffic through a keyword like that would cost tens of thousands of dollars in research, content development, and other SEO efforts. You’d be much better off finding narrower and more localized search terms. Another option would be to forgo search engine marketing altogether and use another strategy to increase traffic to your site.

To discern which search terms would most benefit your website efficiently and effectively, you conduct (or hire someone to conduct) keyword research. This is a process in which you start with some general and obvious search terms and use various online SEO tools to expand the list of terms, so that there are plenty of choices. Then, you review each of the terms to determine how competitive each one will be, how much content you’d have to add to your site to compete effectively, and decide which keywords your target customers are most likely to enter into a search engine. For example, people searching for the term “books” are not necessarily looking for an independent bookstore (here’s a hint — “bookstore” is a more targeted keyword than “books”) and even if they are looking for such a store, they may be in a different geographic location.

Here are some of the questions you want to keep in mind when conducting keyword research:

• What are the primary products or services that the website offers?
• What alternative or synonymous keywords can be used?
• How much search volume do these keywords generate each month?
• Which keywords are potential customers likely to use in searching for these products or services?
• What does the competition for these keywords look like?

It’s important to note that when we talk about keyword competition, it’s not necessarily the same businesses with which we’re competing. In other words, there will be other sites that are using the same keywords as you, but their product or service offerings may not be directly competing with yours. You’re competing with them to get search engine traffic via keywords rather than competing with them in business.

SEO

For many small businesses, a little SEO can really boost traffic. The decision of whether or not to pursue SEO is one that must be made by each individual business, and the decision will likely rest on how competitive keywords are within your industry, the amount of resources you can dedicate to optimization, and the findings that come from keyword research. One thing, however, is basic: SEO starts with keyword research, and keywords should never be chosen on a whim. A little research can go a long way in helping you make smart decisions about whether search engine marketing and SEO is the right online marketing strategy for your business.

Scribizzy offers a full suite of SEO services. To learn more visit our SEO Services page, or if you’re ready to launch an SEO project, start now by getting a quote online.

An Introduction to SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

If you own or operate a website, you’ve probably heard of search engine optimization or SEO.

My first introduction to search engine optimization happened several years ago, when I first started learning about website management and blogging. I already knew how to create a website and write the content, but getting traffic was a completely different ballgame.

Search engine optimization (SEO) was a distant promise that if you build a website, and then optimize it for search engines, visitors would come. But it seemed highly complicated. There were long lists of things you should and shouldn’t do to attract search engine traffic. I studied it from a distance for a long time.

And then I became a website copywriter.

As a website copywriter, SEO is often part and parcel of my job. Clients ask for blog posts, articles, and website copy that includes any number of particular keywords, and sometimes clients simply ask that I include “any keywords that make sense.”

Ah, if only it were that simple.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization is the practice of increasing the volume of traffic to a website by improving its rank on search engines through organic search results. The idea is that the higher a site ranks for any given keyword, the more traffic the site will draw.

SEO is the acronym for search engine optimization, and SEO also refers to those professionals who provide search engine optimization services.

There are two types of search engine optimization:

1. White hat SEO
2. Black hat SEO

White hat SEO attempts to follow basic guidelines set forth by search engines. According to Wikipedia, white hat SEO “is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to trick the algorithm from its intended purpose.”

Black hat SEO uses techniques that involve deception, often using SEO to rank for keywords that are not relevant to a site’s content. The only thing any honest business person needs to know about black hat SEO is that it’s wrong, it screws things up for businesses and websites that are trying to draw relevant traffic through SEO, and it can get you banned from Google and other search engines. Stay away from it.

How Does SEO Work?

I could tell you, but then I’d have to charge you.

Alright, let’s cover a few basics. Here’s the ultra-slimmed down version of how SEO works:

Search engines employ spiders, which are automated bots that travel around the Internet checking the content of the websites they find. The content is saved and indexed, then checked against highly complex algorithms to determine whether these websites should be listed when searchers enter certain phrases and keywords into the search engine. The algorithms also determine the order in which websites should appear on search engine results pages (SERPs).

SEO is all about getting a website to rank well on the search engine results pages for particular and relevant keywords. Optimizing a site may include the following steps:

1. Establish website purpose, goals, themes, and assess its content. For existing websites, evaluate current keyword and search engine performance by analyzing traffic statistics.
2. Build a list of keywords that are relevant to the site’s content, and which are likely terms that the target audience might enter in search engines to find said content. The size of the list will depend on the size of the site. There could be five keywords or five hundred.
3. Optimize existing content or create new content using keywords in the site code, text, and tags. This, of course, is the actual act of optimization.
4. Engage in further search engine optimization by using a wide range of tools, both for actual optimization and for tracking purposes. Example: posting a sitemap will encourage search engine spiders to visit and crawl a site more quickly, and therefore index and rank the site much faster. Using a smart statistics tool, such as Google Analytics, will help you assess how well your SEO strategies are working.
5. As you track keyword and search engine performance over time, tweak and add content as necessary and continue to develop and hone your SEO strategy.

That’s it. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? It’s not, and that’s why SEOs who are good at what they do are making big bucks.

Does it Work? Is it Worth It?

Search engine optimization is an inexact science. For example, nobody except the men in white coats over at Google know the algorithm that Google uses to rank websites on its search engine results pages. The best anyone can do is try different SEO methods, and then test and track them to see what works and what doesn’t.

Now, there are a number of factors that SEOs know to be true with regards to search engine optimization. For example, if all else is equal, an older site will probably rank higher than a newer site. Age matters, and Google gives seniority to sites that have been around longer. We also know that there are certain places in the code and in the formatting of a web page that can give SEO a boost. For example, search engines look at page titles and headings. They believe these are good indicators of a site’s content.

However, any search engine could change its algorithm at any time, which means certain SEO efforts might suddenly stop working as well as they have in the past. Furthermore, it’s hard to know what the competition is up to. If another website offering the same content as yours is also optimizing, they might outdo you – possibly by simply being a couple of years older than you are – and you could drop in rank as a result.

But for the most part, yes, search engine optimization works. After optimizing approximately 25 pages on one of my websites, my traffic nearly doubled.

Who Benefits from SEO?

Ideally, everyone involved benefits. Search engines want to produce search results that make searchers happy. If you’re searching for “baby gifts” and end up on an adult website, you probably aren’t going to be too happy about that, especially if your five-year-old is sitting right there next to you.

Good, honest, white hat SEO benefits search engines because if they produce quality results, more people will use those search engines to conduct searches online. People using the search engines will also benefit because when they search, they’ll find exactly what they’re looking for. Finally, website owners will benefit because SEO will help them draw targeted traffic – that means that searches will produce visitors who are a match to what the site is offering.

And that’s a good thing.

Is Search Engine Optimization Right for Me?

Consider this: the search term “flowers” gets almost 25 million searches per month on Google alone. Now, if you are in the flower industry, wouldn’t you like your site to appear at the top of those search results?

Maybe not.

Let’s say you run a small, local flower business, and you primarily do flower arrangements for weddings. You are an independent entrepreneur, and maybe you have an assistant or two.

Do you really think you could handle 25 million potential customers, especially if they are located all around the world?

A florist, such as the one described above, would be better off using more targeted keywords – such as phrases that include “flowers,” “bridal,” and “wedding.” However, the best approach might be purchasing ads or developing partnerships with other local businesses that provide wedding services.

Relying solely on search engine traffic might be beneficial for some businesses and websites, but others will fare much better by investing in alternative online marketing strategies, and there are plenty of those. Each website has a different set of goals and purposes, and it’s no good to draw a hoard of traffic if it’s not a match to what you’re offering on your site. Plus, you’re taking up valuable space on the search engine results pages that other folks could really use!

How Hard is it to Optimize a Site?

Like most things on the internet, search engine optimization is as difficult or as easy as you make it. You could go all out, and invest days, weeks, even months optimizing a site. Or, you could churn out a few hours. Chances are that you’ll see better results if you pour a lot of effort into it, but if you have an older site with tons of content, you might just get lucky with minimal effort.

For example, you might optimize a few pages on your site and find that doing so lands you on about page five of the search engine results page. At that point, you can be happy with the traffic that page five sends your way, or you can dig your heels in and continue optimizing, and try to get to page three or even page one. You can also optimize the content only, or you can get into the code and optimize that too. Plus there are host of tools you can start using that will enhance your SEO efforts.

As you can probably guess, the more you do, the better your results will be.

Summary

Search engine optimization helps drive more traffic to your site, and it’s one of the most popular online marketing solutions around. However, SEO is not for everyone. Optimizing a website for search engine traffic can be highly involved for website owners who want to optimize on their own, and it can be costly for business owners who hire professional SEOs to do the work for them.

However, the benefits can be immense. There is unlimited potential for sites that can thrive through search engine traffic and in many cases, efforts and investment of time and resources can pay off in a big way.

Interested in optimizing your site to increase traffic from search engines? Check out Scribizzy’s SEO services.