You may have the flashiest website – but are you reaching out to your target audience effectively? Keyword research which effectively signposts your content towards search engine spiders but, more importantly, users, requires a level of planning to position your site towards the demographic whom you wish to target.
This year, we have seen a shift away from traditional search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques, which allowed for the manipulation of search engines, which could result in your site coming top on Google relatively easily. Those days are gone with the game changing ‘Google Panda’ update, which penalises sites that Google interprets as using ‘spammy techniques’.
So how can you perform keyword research to ensure your content is pitched at the correct people, whilst staying in Google’s good books?
Be clear on your proposition
Firstly, you need to be clear about the purpose of your website. What messages are you trying to get across – do you solve a problem? Do you target a specific geography, audience or market?
Go through key pages of your site with a colleague and jot down words and phrases that sum up your content. These could range from single words to a short sentence. This is a simple but effective exercise to gain insight into how people may describe your offering which, in turn, they are likely to be searching for within search engines.
The task is then to match up this searcher intent to the most relevant pages on your site, boosting your visitor numbers and providing a great user experience to your visitors.
Judge competition and demand
Unfortunately there are only ten spots on the first page of Google, so even the most mundane keywords will be sought after by competitors looking to channel searcher intent. As a result, it is useful to use the Google Keyword Tool to judge competition and demand to use your time most effectively.
Whilst this tool doesn’t give the exact search volume, it is useful as an indicative tool for judging popularity. Be sure to select the country you are targeting so that the tool returns local market data. You can even drill down the data to city level – offering unique local insights.
Once you’ve discovered some keyword terms with a reasonable search volume, do a simple search on Google and judge the popularity of the keywords – do your competitors rank? Are the spots taken up by big brands that it will be harder to rank against? Are many people using pay per click (PPC) advertising to bid on the keyword?
What are your competitors up to? A quick way to look under the bonnet of a competitors’ site is to right click and ‘view source’ when browsing competitors’ pages. Usually the META Title, Description and Keywords at the top of the page will give an indication as to what they are targeting – do you want a piece of the action too?
Do not be put off from choosing competitive keywords as targets to rank for, but try and manage your expectations regarding the timescale and resource needed to rank for these ‘killer terms’.
Keyword map your site
Taking a staggered approach to your keyword research will allow for gentle scaling up of this research. Put together a simple context matrix within an Excel spreadsheet, listing the pages you’re optimising in one column. Then create fields for ‘primary, secondary and tertiary keywords’.
You should now be armed with a selection of high / medium and low competition keywords relevant to your business. The next stage is to match these up to the most relevant pages on your site.
The primary keyword should be the main ‘killer’ keyword you wish to rank for, the secondary keyword should be ‘longer tail’ (two or three words long) and a medium term target – and the tertiary keyword should be a low competition ‘quick win’ keyword.
You may of course look to target more than three keywords per page – but this approach allows for a structured foundation that you can scale up for your keyword mapping. This approach should also allow you to avoid ‘cannibalising’ your own site – by avoiding having your own pages compete with each other for the same terms.
Review and tweak
It’s likely you’ll be constantly updating and adding new articles and content to your site, so it’s important to keep your content matrix up to date, so you know which keywords you are targeting to which page.
However, it’s equally important to periodically review how your target keywords are performing. A simple way to do this is within Google Analytics by selecting Content > Site Pages > All pages, and then selecting an individual page and applying ‘keyword’ as the primary filter.
This will show you all of the keywords which have been used to enter a specific page on your site. Entry keywords which deliver a low average time on page or a high bounce rate metric (people who have left after viewing one page) may suggest that the keyword you are targeting doesn’t match up with your page content.
Of course, nothing is static, and search behaviours change. So it’s good practice to review, tweak and renew keyword research every few months to keep abreast of new opportunities to bring in relevant traffic to your site.
