After the results are shown, you can sort them by search volume to find out which words people search for the most. These should be considered as good candidates for optimisation. You of course need to review the suggested words and make sure they match your intentions in how you want to promote your product, so don’t just blindly take up the suggestions from Google – use this as inspiration and data to make a decision that makes sense for your business.
Another way, is to manually review some of your competitors to see the words they are targeting…the way to do this is to grab yourself a piece of paper and follow these steps:
a) Do a search on Google for the most obvious phrase that you want to be ranked well for – in our example above it might be simply “Nike Sneakers” – a bunch of search results will appear of course.
b) Look up at the titles of the search results that come back as follows:
| c) |
Review these titles for the first couple of pages of results. This should give you ideas for a range of other words that might be relevant for your business. In the example above, “Air Jordan”, or “Nike Air Force” might be other terms you optimise for. |
If that all looks a bit convoluted, you can subscribe to WordTracker, one of the leading keyword tools http://www.wordtracker.com which will cost you around $9US for a 1 day subscription in order to have a once off usage of the tool. WordTracker not only helps you find words, but it also evaluates their popularity – which we’re going to look at next. If you’re less technically savvy – the above manual procedure is nice and reliable.
Another very simple way to get keyword ideas is just to visit other websites which offer products and services similar to yours and just read over the pages on their site in order to gain ideas for keywords.
There are other more technical methods for doing keyword research, but the above are some basic, and straightforward ways to identify keyword ideas.
Do this until you have say 30 – 40 keywords that you think are relevant to your industry, or that you might type into a search engine yourself if looking for your business or its products.
So you now have a 30 – 40 word long list of words that are relevant to your business or products…..which ones are you going to optimise your site for? Well if 100,000 people search on Nike Sneakers every day, but only 500 people search for Running Apparel each day, then of course you’re going to want to optimise your site for the more popular term in order to attract the most website visitors…..aren’t you? Well yes and no….
There’s an issue here of keyword competition. If you optimise for the more generic words that are very very popular – say just “Nike”, then you’re going to have a lot more competition on the search engines, than if you say choose something more specific like Nike Sneakers Melbourne. It’s going to be harder to rank well for the generic highly popular terms…. And so early in your SEO efforts, you may choose to optimise for 7 – 10 niche terms rather than going head to head with big players in competing for the most popular terms like “nike sneakers”. Some of these decisions are governed by your budget and how much effort you intend to invest in your SEO efforts. If you have enough resources, and the right techniques (that we’re teaching you here!) you can expect good results, even for more popular terms.
I usually try to find two-word keyword phrases like “Nike Sneakers” or “Running Shoes” and then initially optimise for these terms rather than the single word generic terms like “Shoes”, “Sneakers”. We’ll elaborate on this in the next Step 2 about how to write Page Titles. There are some tricks I’ll explain which will help you with this dilemma.
For now you can visit the http://adwords.google.com as shown in the screenshots above, and insert all the keywords you’ve chosen together into the tool (i.e. paste the list in, one keyword on each line), and then let Google assess their popularity.
By sorting the results by search volume, and then reviewing your list with the google on-screen results – you can quickly see which of the words you’ve chosen have most people searching for them.
Next: Page 4 - Overture Keyword Tool, Selecting your primar keyword phrases
