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May 05

Keyword research can help your rankings

Published in seo, marketing, keywords by oscworks |

What is keyword research? How do you go about doing it?

Doing your research can help you improve your rankings.

An essential part of getting your website ranking well is to do your keyword research homework. Keyword research is the process of looking at what words your target audience profile are actually using to find your site, and find your competitors sites. Are people searching for 'mobile phones', 'cellphones', 'buy phones', 'cellphones' or the individual brands of mobiles? How does the US search behaviour provided by most keyword research tools map to Australia?

Here are some steps you can follow when doing your keyword research.

1. Develop your starter keyword list (also called seed keywords)

Try to put yourself in the mindset of your customer. What words would they use to search for your products and services? If you have friends or family who fit into the target audience, casually poll them to find out what words they would use or simply start a conversation about your business with them and listen to how they talk about your products. Think also about the customer enquiries you have handled on the phone. What do your customers ask about when they call you? What words do they use to describe your products?

Go to your local newsagent or dairy and have a look in some magazines devoted to your product or service area. What are the key important topics? What issues or stories are important? What words do you see time and again?

Once you have 15-20 starter keywords, you can expand these using online tools that look for related words, or simply use your Thesaurus from your bookshelf.

2. Expand from words to phrases

Start expanding your key words into phrases. For example, instead of 'mobile phones', you could try things like 'latest mobile phones', 'mobile phone accessories', 'how to buy a mobile phone' and 'find mobile phone deals'.

3. Use a tool to determine keyword popularity

There are a number of free tools on the Internet that you can use to determine keyword popularity (i.e. how many searches per day are performed on a phrase or word). Put them into a spreadsheet and order them from top to bottom.

4. Use the information you have gained

Your list of top keywords can be used to develop static content - talking about key issues in your topic area (that you determined from the magazine research) along with key search words. Write 5-10 static content pages, one per topic, and submit each of the pages to search engines.

5. Keep repeating the process

Repeating the process on an ongoing basis will keep your keywords up-to-date and relevant. Search engine optimising is an ongoing process not a one-off event.

Nov 02

How to use Google for keyword research

Published in seo, keywords, google, advertising by oscworks |
There are many keyword research techniques available. Some powerful ones for Australia and New Zealand come directly from Google. They are also free.

If you're trying to improve your search engine ranking, one place to start is to think about what your customers are searching for. Like any marketing activity, doing your research helps. How can you find out what people are searching for? What are the most competitive search terms? What are your competitors doing?

There are a number of keyword research techniques. Since your customers are probably searching in Google, going to the source for your keyword research can be very helpful indeed. Here are just a few keyword research techniques that use Google.

Use the Adwords tool

Many third-party research tools do not offer results that include results from Australia and New Zealand and only focus on the US. This makes Google's Adwords tool is a great starting point for determining what your customers are searching for.

To use the tool visit http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and choose the country you are getting results for. Then try entering the names of your most popular products and services into the 'Descriptive words or phrases' keywords box, or the words you think your customers are searching for to find your site (you can look in your server logs to find this information). Then click 'Get keyword ideas' and you're away.

AAnother advantage of the Adwords tool is that it lets you generate keywords based on the content of other webpages - e.g. those of your competitors. Look up the top performing site or brand in your product category and get some keyword suggestions that way. The tool will give you a graphical indication of how competitive each keyword is and how many searches were performed on it in the last month. All useful information in your keyword research approach.

Also try Google Suggest

Google Suggest offers dropdown suggestions of search terms as you enter a search query. It tells you similar phrases to the one you are typing that contain the first word in your phrase. It also shows you the number of searches in Google USA for that keyword. If you enter your product and service names into the tool, it can give you some useful suggestions./p>

Google Suggest is included as part of Google's Toolbar search box which you can download and install for free on your own computer. Since it bases its suggestions on the first word you type, it doesn't provide suggestions using similar words (e.g. 'mobiles' and 'cellphones') but it is a good quick reference tool.

Yahoo! has produced a similar tool called Search Assist. It returns a much broader range of suggestions than Google Suggest, some of which may not be directly relevant to your products and services. This is helpful because it can tell you the types of results that may come up for the words you are using in your Google Adwords or Yahoo pay-per-click advertising. You can then exclude search phrases that return a lot of results that may not lead to qualified click-throughs.

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