Step Wise SEO

Once you have a long list of possible keywords and tools in hand to help you analyze them, you need to consider the following important part of the keyword research components:

Search Popularity How many people are actually searching for a given term
Relevance How well a keyword connects with your site and conversion goals Competition How many, and how well, other sites are targeting a given keyword

Finalizing your top target keywords will require a balancing act between all three of these factors. We’ll look a little more closely at each of them here.

Search Popularity
Both YSM and Wordtracker provide values for keyword popularity. However, we recommend Wordtracker over YSM for two reasons:

First, Wordtracker pulls from a larger network of searchers. Second, Wordtracker is much more specific about word syntax.

For example, YSM may combine “IL” with “Illinois,” and you will never know which one is actually more popular with searchers.

Wordtracker gives you the option of looking at the specific differences in terminology that you need to know in order to choose the “just right” keywords.

It can be time consuming pulling up the search popularity values for every term on your long list, but you can save time by copying and pasting several words at a time-or your whole list-into the search popularity tool.

If you’re good with Excel, you can even export the search results from Wordtracker for easy import into your Keywords Worksheet!

Search popularity values provided by these services do not give you the total number of searches throughout the entire Internet, so you should only use them for comparing the relative search popularity between two terms.

You may notice while you gather your popularity numbers that you find other tempting keywords that you hadn’t previously considered.

Add them to the list! You’ll begin slicing and dicing this list very soon, but for now it won’t hurt to add more promising ideas.

With these numbers in black and white you’ll have a much stronger command of which terms are going to be good performers for you.

Relevance
Relevance is in many ways a judgment call: How would a searcher feel if they searched for this term and found your site?

Would your site answer their question or resolve their need? Does a good landing page for this term currently exist on your site, or could one be built?

We are going to ask you to classify relevance on a scale from Very Poor to Excellent. Your relevance values should also incorporate the following perspectives:

Your writers/editors Ask yourself if the people that write content on your website will be comfortable using this term to describe your products and services. Better yet, go ask them the question.

Other sites that come up in the search Try entering the term into a search engine and see what other sites come up.

Are the top-ranking websites from organizations that are similar to yours? Surprisingly, in SEO you often do want to be situated in the vicinity of your competitors.

If a searcher enters a keyword and sees a page full of weird, seemingly unrelated results, they are likely to try again with a different search.

Value of the conversion Your relevance level should also take into account the value of the conversion for a term.

For example, if the two terms “ginger syrup” and “crystallized ginger” are equally well matched to your site but you believe that people searching for “crystallized ginger” are going to be more valuable conversions (because it’s a much more expensive delicacy!),

then that keyword should get a boost. It’s guesswork and intuition at this point, but after a few months, you’ll have some tracking under your belt and a much clearer understanding of the conversion values for different terms.

It’s very rare that a one-word term is going to pass the relevance test-unless it’s your business name!

Look at any one-word keywords on your list. In what other context, other than your immediate conversion goal, could searchers be using them?

Keyword: baby clothes, Relevance Rating: Good We would rate this relevance level as Good because it uses two rather generic words to accurately describe the product that
a company sells.

But it also encompasses lots of things that this company doesn’t sell. Searchers could use this term to look for used clothes and large chain stores in addition boutique items.

Keyword: unique baby clothes, Relevance Rating: Excellent This keyphrase uses a modifier-”unique “-to more clearly describe the product that the company sells.

You may be wondering, “Is a subjective word like `unique’ a good candidate for targeting?”

It is, but only if you think it’s accurate, and if you think people will use it to search for your product!

So while “unique” may be appropriate for you to target, there’s probably no point in targeting boastful terms like “best” or “finest.”

Sure, we know your offerings are the best, but is “best truck liners” really more relevant than something more specific on your list, like “heavy-duty truck liners”?

Keyword: cheap baby clothes, Relevance Rating: Very Poor We would rate this relevance level as Very Poor because Babyfuzzkin is a high-end product and does not match the description “cheap.”

While it may be tempting to target popular or appealing terms like “cheap,” if it does not describe your product or service, it is going to be a wasted effort and a bust for conversions.

Keyword: unique baby shower gifts, Relevance Rating: Excellent This term describes Babyfuzzkin’s products very specifically. As this example shows, highly relevant terms are often longer.

Keyword: Babyfuzzkin, Relevance Rating: Excellent You can’t get a tighter match than the company name!

Competition Level
In SEO, you’ve got to choose your battles. Sure, we’d all love to have great ranks for the most popular terms:

“real estate,” “games,” “golf,” or “Angelina Jolie.” But the time and money spent for good ranking on these terms can be prohibitive.

There are lots of ways to assess the competition level for a keyword; see the sidebar “Sizing Up the Competition” for some of our favorite methods.

We’re going to ask you to rate your keyword competition level from Very Low to Very High. What’s most important is that you use the same measuring stick for all of your terms.

Sizing Up the Competition
You know your business, so you know what aspects of your business have more, or stronger, competitors.

If you work for a bank, you don’t need the numbers to tell you that the term ‘low mortgage rates’ is going to be very competitive.

But for terms that are less obvious, you can do a competition gut check by searching for that term, and looking for the following indicators:

• ”Do most of the sites in the top several pages of results appear to have the same conversion goals as you?

Do you recognize some of your known competitors in there? Did you just find new competitors that you hadn’t known about before?

This is only one part of the competition landscape, but it’s an important one.”

• ”Are most of the sites in the top several pages of results trying to sell something related to your term?

Even SEO newbies can see that the vast majority of sites that show up for ‘low mortgage rates’ are trying to sell mortgages.

But search for ‘low literacy rates’ and you can really see the difference-there’s much less of a feeling that the site owners are jumping up and down, shouting,’ Over here!’”

• ”How many sponsored listings do you see for the term in question? Sites that are selling something are likely to spend more time and money optimizing, so terms with a lot of commercial results are likely to be more competitive.”

Industry insight is important, but quantitative values give you more solid ground to stand on. Anyone estimating competition levels for a keyword should research these numbers:

• ”How many pages on the Web are already optimized for the term? To estimate this value, you can perform a specialized search on Google and find out how many sites have that keyword in their HTML page title tag.

Just type allintitle: ‘keyword’ into the search box. For example, a company selling baby clothes would type allintitle: ‘baby clothes’ to find out how many websites are using that term in their HTML title.

• ”What are the top bid prices for the term on PPC services? You need to know how to set up accounts and check these values.”

Here are the competition levels, and the thinking behind them, for a selection of a company given above:

Keyword: infants, Competition Level: Very High On a gut level, most single-word searches are going to rate as very competitive;

there are just too many sites in the world that contain this term. Quantitatively speaking, the allintitle search on Google shows that there are over 2.2 million websites with the term in their HTML titles.

Keyword: baby clothes, Competition Level: Very High This term is also rather competitive.

Obviously, there are numerous companies, some very large, that sell this product online and will be competing for this search traffic.

You can click as far down as Yahoo!’s 10th search results page and there’s no end in sight to the companies selling baby clothes. Google shows almost 200,000 pages with the term in their HTML titles.

Keyword: unique baby clothes, Competition Level: Moderate This one may not be so cut and dried. This is still a very competitive term at first glance:

there’s really not much difference in the “feel” of the competitor listings for this term as compared to the listings for “baby clothes.”

But with only roughly 300 pages showing on Google with this exact phrase in their HTML title, this term goes into the Moderate competition bracket.

Keyword: unique baby shower gifts, Competition Level: High There are only roughly 900 pages showing on Google with this exact phrase in their HTML titles.

You might be tempted to call this one Moderate. But here’s where the gut feeling comes in: Unique is a marketing word, making this term more commercial in nature.

Keyword: babyfuzzkin, Competition Level: Very Low Actually, the competition level for this keyword is nonexistent. There are no sites ranking for it, and there don’t appear to be any sites targeting it in their keywords.