Keyword research is fundamental to any SEO or SEM campaign. But how do you go about selecting keywords?
Keyword selection is all about trying to find the words and phrases your potential customers are using as search queries, then leveraging those words organically or targeting them in pay-per-click campaigns. Keywords can be defined by two categories: broad and narrow. These are sometimes referred to as short-tail and long-tail, respectively. Generally speaking, it is often harder to achieve higher organic rankings for broad terms than for narrow terms. While narrow terms typically receive a lesser volume of searches per month, being able to attract and convert visitors on a combination of many narrow search phrases will result in better quality traffic and ultimately should generate more sales than the broad search traffic.
Keyword Research: First Steps
There are a number of tools with which you can get started. First, start with a broad term. In this example, I'll use the word "cookie." One method of searching for additional narrow phrases is to use search engines. For example, when entering the word "cookie" as a search query, I get the following on Google:
Analyzing Your Keywords for Organic Search
As you can see, keyword phrase lists can get pretty long, pretty quickly. Once you have your words, what do you do with them? How do you know which words are best to use? For starters, use your common sense and read through the lists. If you're running a cookie recipe site, you likely don't want terms like "cookie monster" or "girl scout cookies." At least, you wouldn't them for the recipe portion of your site. However, those phrases might be neat to target for content marketing. You can also use SEMrush filtering tools to remove words from your entire keyword list. Remove all the phrases you're not going to target. When you're done, remove the phrases you currently rank well for. Remember, search engines rank pages — not sites. If you have a page that ranks well for a certain term, don't compete against yourself by using that term on another page. Target new phrases on each page. There are many ways you can target phrases. Popularity is one of the more common. After all, the higher volume of searches performed in a month, the more popular that phrase is, right? But you should also take into account how many results are returned on the phrases you're targeting. If you don't rank at all, you'll be the new fish in the pond of results. Will you be one of millions, tens of millions or even more? Many organizations refer to a metric known as KEI, the keyword effectiveness index. Simply put, the KEI is a ratio of the number of results for a given term with relation to the number of searches performed in a month. The formula for calculating KEI has been debated by SEOs. But the generally accepted formula has been the number of searches squared divided by the number of results.
(# of monthly searches)2 # of results returned
This formula rewards terms that have a high search volume and a low number of results. The higher the resultant metric, the more effective the keyword should be. This formula, however, is far from perfect. It does not take into account spammy or unoptimized result pages. It also doesn't take into account any of the personalizing of search. Rich snippets are being called by some SEOs the "magic bullet" for search. Eric Schmidt already went on record saying that sites with Authorship markup will rank higher than those without. However, this formula still gives you an indication on where to start sorting your keywords.
Choose Your Words Wisely
Once you have your word lists filtered and sorted, get started on that copy. Remember to write your copy naturally. It should be easy for your visitors to read. Never write toward keywords and rankings. Always write for your users. Let keywords be your guide. Let variations be your companion. Use your newly discovered keywords and phrases wisely. Remember you need not target specific phrases only for higher on-page performance. Use your new keyword lists to glean new ideas for blog posts, supplemental pages and other content marketing initiatives. While some of the discovered phrases might not be an exact fit, people are actively searching for these words.
Author bio:
Thom Craver is an international speaker, digital strategist, author and adjunct professor. He specializes in SEO and Web analytics. His last article for SEMrush was "Redirects: The Why and How."
Comments
Asks great questions and provides brilliant answers.
Keyword research is the core part of SEO and semrush is one of the best tools for keyword research and competitor analysis.
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Thanks
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but just a couple of sentences can make a difference in search results."
A great point. You also have to remember, especially for an e-commerce site, chances are visitors are entering on category or specific product pages and not just the homepage. You need to make sure a potential customer has all the information they need no matter what page they come in on.
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Using existing conversion data from your analytics software is also a great way to define optimizing targets for organic listings
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