Keyword research is more than simply looking at a keyword tool and picking some related keywords. It is the most important factor in a successful SEO campaign because SEO is a long-term strategy. Selecting and focusing on the wrong keywords can result in wasting a year or so and thousands of dollars optimizing for keywords that you may never rank for or that will provide very little ROI.
Here are a few things to consider when researching keywords for an SEO campaign.
Target Market Dynamics
Understand your customers thoroughly. Understand their offline and online behaviors and then develop a web experience around those behaviors.
Who are the customers that spend the most or spend a lot of time on your site? What are they searching for? For example, someone searching for bulk purchases is more likely to provide a higher profit margin. The search volume may be lower here but it may be easier to achieve top rankings and the returns will be greater for each sale provided.
The most important point here is to make sure that your keywords are focused towards the right people so that when your customers are looking for you, they can find you!
Target the converting stages of the buying process
Consumers at different stages of the buying process will always use different search terms. People in the later stages of the buying process, closer to the actual purchase, will use more specific, ‘transactional’ keywords. For the largest ROI, targeting keywords directly related to the purchase of your products will provide a much higher conversion rate than informational searches.
A good way to identify if a keyword is informational or transactional is to look at the top 10 results for that keyword. If the top 10 results are dominated by your competitors then it is safe to say that it is transactional. Use a tool like Adgooroo or Google Adwords or even Wordtracker to do this. The long-tail keywords are stronger converters because their usage signals the arrival of the prospect at the decision stage of the buying process.
Keyword search volumes
Chose keywords that have a large amount of qualified traffic. For most businesses, it’s important to understand that there is no point in targeting a keyword in your SEO campaign simply because it is specific to your product. If a keyword does not have any search volume, it will not provide any traffic. Use Adgooroo or the Google Adwords Tool to determine search volumes.
Budget for the activity
It is essential to be realistic with your search engine goals – your goals must match your budget! If you target a keyword that will take years to achieve rankings for or that you are unlikely to rank for at all with your current spend, you will end up wasting whatever budget you have. It is far better to focus on keywords that are more specific and less competitive, but for which you are more likely to rank in the first page of results.
What pages on your website can rank highly?
I cannot emphasize the importance of this point – each keyword you target MUST have a dedicated page on your site that you can optimise for that keyword! If there isn’t, you will never achieve rankings for that keyword. So there is absolutely no reason to target a keyword unless at least one page on your website can rank for that keyword.
It is certainly fine to target 2-3 keywords on a single page if needed, and there will usually be some long-tail rankings achieved as a by-product, but the important thing is to ensure any major keyword you are targeting has a page on your website with text content on the topic. This will ensure that, with the optimization you do, you are actually able to achieve some rankings for the target keyword.
Common mistakes to avoid
- When researching keyword volumes, avoid broad match results and focus on exact match data from the drop down menu otherwise you will be looking at inaccurate numbers for your campaign.
- Many marketers that are within a business pick keywords for which they think their consumers are searching. While this is a good place to start, you need to be objective and diligent with your research. Consumers do not always think the same way that you might so make sure that the keywords you select are actually keywords that consumers will use.
- Many marketers target a keyword because it is very popular or very specific without any website content relating to that keyword. Ensure that a page is created with the keywords present within that content.
