Keyword research, made simple(r)

21 09 2010

For me, the backbone of any search and social media strategy needs to start with keywords, or search terms. Now, I’m not saying that keyword research is a simple thing to do, but there are ways to reduce the headache and worry that might come if you haven’t done it before. This isn’t a post for you seasoned digital marketers, this is for those of you who are just starting and are unsure where to begin.

Why do I think that keywords are the basis of any digital strategy? Simple. They are the words and phrases, real people, like you and me, put in to search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo! when we want to find specific information, services or products. They’re the first thing people start with on the web when trying to find something. So, it seems to make sense to me that we as digital marketers should be doing the same.

Here are 7 tips in chronological order that I think will make your life a little more simple when researching the keywords that are right for your business:

  1. Think about the products and services you offer. What kinds of words would you enter in to a search engine if you wanted to find them? Make a list. For instance, you sell shoes, you probably want people to find you when they type in things like “shoes” or “womens shoes” or “mens shoes”, and so on…
  2. What are the other ways that people might look for the same thing? You might like to get a little more specific here, so things like “high heel shoes”, or “mens dress shoes” or “comfortable shoes” etc.
  3. When you have your list, there are a number of keyword research tools, or programs that you can use to let you know which words are actually searched on (looked for), and how you can develop on your list. The Google Adwords Keyword Tool is a great place to start for this.
  4. Once you have a bit of a list, do a few searches in Google for some of the terms you’ve identified. You can then see who is already ranking highly for those terms. Go back in to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and enter their website address. The tool will then crawl their website and come back with another list of all the terms it thinks that website is relevant for.
  5. You should now have a pretty big list. Aaaaarrrgggghhhh! To start with, order the list by the search volumes around each term (high to low). Whilst you may think that you only want to rank for the terms that have the highest search volumes, these are the one’s that will take the longest, and need the most time, resource and budget to achieve. That’s because they’re the most competitive! So, what you need to do is define a mix of terms from the big keywords (the HEAD terms), and the search phrases that have smaller search volumes (the TAIL terms). The TAIL terms are your low hanging fruit and you have more chance of ranking for these more quickly. Plus, when you do, they’re very targeted so if you have the right content on the website, you have more chance of persuading someone to take the action you desire. There’s more information the “head and tail of search” here. Ideally, you want a nice mix.
  6. Group the keywords by category. For instance (using the shoes analogy again), you may want to group by gender, size, brand name and so on. Make these reflect the current pages that you have on your website. If you don’t have a relevant page, perhaps you need to start thinking about making one! Now you need to cull to get yourself a manageable list. I’d recommend that you choose only 10-20 to begin with, or 2-3 per page that you want to thread the terms in to.
  7. Once you’ve defined the keywords you want to rank for, you can use them to start planning your SEO activity, link acquisition work, defining your content strategy and getting to better grips with social media. There will be more information about this soon…

Here are some great tools that you can use for your keyword research:

Google Keyword Tool – For me, the easiest and best tool to use. The only downside is that it only tracks Google search volume (but that’s most of the searches covered!). It’s easy to use too.

WordTracker (in their own words) - Not only will Wordtracker’s Keywords tool save you hundreds of hours on research, it also allows you to dig deep into the ‘long tail’ of keywords. It has been designed specifically to help you find new moneymaking niches. You will be able to find the phrases that your customers are searching for, and your competitors aren’t targeting.

SEOBook (in their own words) – Our Free Keyword Research Tool :

  • Offers rough suggested daily search volumes by market for Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.*
  • Links the search volumes to the related global search results.
  • Provides links to price estimate tools from Google AdWords. That Google AdWords tool shows the necessary bid to rank #1 for 85% of queries, and roughly how much traffic you could expect AdWords to send you based on that bid price and ad position.
  • Links to Google Trends, Google Suggest, Google Synonyms, Yahoo! Suggest, and Keyword Discovery keyword research results.
  • Links to various vertical databases like Topix.net, Google Blogsearch, and Del.icio.us to let you know if people are talking about your topic and what types of resources they are referencing.
  • Is driven off the Wordtracker keyword suggestion tool. If you sign up for a Wordtracker account they offer many additional keyword research features and tools that are lacking in our basic keyword tool.

SEO Moz’s Term Extractor (in their own words) –

This tool analyzes the content of a page and extracts the terms targeted at search engines. Find out what keywords any page on the web is seeking to target/rank for.

Google Suggest – Google Suggest is a great way to see the different variations of terms around a specific keyword that may help you expand your original list.

As I said to begin, this is a much simplified explanation of something that I could write thousands of words about, but I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t help with the headache or the demystification of the subject matter! Hopefully, this will get you started. If you need any further support, information or help with your keyword or search term research, please just get in touch, we’d love to hear from you. We offer training sessions, or can just do the work for you, whatever you’d prefer!

“IMAGE: by Flickr user Nina Matthews Photography”


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Categories : Planning, Research, SEO

Google Instant – faster than a speeding typer!

9 09 2010

Well, after yesterday’s post I’d planned to go and continue my content strategising and Google Instant pops up! So, aligned with my belief in flexibility around blog posting, I’ve cobbled together some initial thoughts on this…

Yesterday, Google revealed what  Marissa Mayer Vice President of Search Product and User Experience at Google, called  “A fundamental shift in search” in Google Instant.

Essentially, Google Instant provides streamed results based on the word you’re typing. Or, in their own words:

“Google Instant is search-before-you-type. Instant takes what you have typed already, predicts the most likely completion and streams results in real-time for those predictions—yielding a smarter and faster search that is interactive, predictive and powerful.

Here are a few of the core features in Google Instant:

  • Dynamic Results – Google dynamically displays relevant search results as you type so you can quickly interact and click through to the web content you need.
  • Predictions – One of the key technologies in Google Instant is that we predict the rest of your query (in light gray text) before you finish typing. See what you need? Stop typing, look down and find what you’re looking for.
  • Scroll to search – Scroll through predictions and see results instantly for each as you arrow down.

Here’s a video that explains Google Instant in greater depth:

Source: The Official Google Blog.

There are already thousands of tweets, comments and blog posts up about this issue and it seems to be causing quite a storm. Google are even saying that Google Instant will “save our users 11 hours with each passing second!” Wow!

But what are the implications of this for brands and websites? Personally, I think that strong brands that have built equity with their consumer base and have a great reputation will continue to enjoy success. Here’s some other things that will need to be thought about:

  1. Impressions recorded for SEO and PPC in Google Adwords and Google Keywords will be skewed. There will be a 3 second delay for an ad “serving” to count as an impression, or it will be triggered by a user hitting the “Search” button. For more info, see here Google Instant Adwords implications announcement and Google Instant Google Analytics implications announcement.
  2. Page titles and meta-descriptions will need to be *even more* enticing than before. If a user is able to make a search so fast and scan so quickly, you’ll have an even shorter window of opportunity to get their attention in the “mosh pit of search”!
  3. Keyword research will become harder as you’ll need to be thinking about how results may appear one letter at a time. Using Google Suggest here should help as it’ll show you how Google predicts certain keywords based on the pattern of typing that’s occurring.
  4. If SEO is driving a lot of your traffic, then this needs to be watched closely as it’s now more important than ever to ensure that you’re content and links reflect the search patterns and words that people are typing in.
  5. Google Instant should provide mobile searchers with a much faster experience, making typing easier for individuals will handhelds to look for what they need.

It’s very early days so these are some initial thoughts and conversations that are going on around the web at the moment. It’s one for a close watching brief. Searchengineland has already posted up a “Complete Users Guide to Google Instant” which is pretty useful.

If Google Instant’s not your thing, you can turn it off in your Preferences Page.

How do you think Google Instant will affect things?


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Categories : Google, SEO

5 simple steps to developing a content strategy

8 09 2010

Hi again all, am back now from holiday and fully back in the swing. How have you all been? The image on this post was taken of me by my lovely fiancé on our recent surf-trip to Portugal and kind of fits with what I’m about to talk about… loosely. Content, or people reading content. Ok, I appreciate it’s very tenuous!

As I was saying in a previous post “Things to think about when creating a brand“, I’ve been pondering a very important element of this and that’s what the content strategy for the blog will be. I had the good fortune in the past of working with an incredibly talented team of content strategists and writers so I’m fully aware how critical this bit is. It’s also a little daunting. I’m still working on what the strategy should be because, at the moment, it’s all a bit random. I promise, there will be cohesion soon! In the meantime, these are the steps I’m taking to try and figure out what I should be writing about, and when:

  1. Auditing and analysing the online space I want to exist in, and appeal to. What search terms are being used to find similar content on other sites? What is this content about? What’s good about it? What’s missing? Is it being shared and commented upon? Is it a popular topic? Is it seasonal? … this is the part I’m undertaking at the moment. From here, the next stage is to:-
  2. Plan. From the above a solid (yet, flexible) content plan needs to be put in place so that I can not only have a vision for where I’m taking the content of the blog but also to help me tie in with my own marketing and sales activity. For instance, if I plan to do an online brand audit of a charity I want to work with, I’ll tie that in with a follow up call / email / meeting to said target. I need to think about how people will find my content so need to make sure I’m optimised for the search engines, and am signposting the content through social media channels. The other great thing for me about a plan is that it should help to mitigate against the foe of any writer, procrastination!
  3. Do it. Exactly as it says. After the audits and planning, the only thing left to do is to actually do it. If you don’t produce anything, you’re forever in the “thinking” or “procrastination” loop! We all know about that one…
  4. Publish. This ties in to stage 2, planning. Once the content is produced and up on the blog, you need to let the world know it’s there. This can be done through any number of ways: press releases, Facebook and Twitter updates, commenting on related work with links back to yours (do this honestly though and with value, don’t become one of those horrible blog spammers!) and so on. This part also ties in to the overall marketing plan, which is something I’ll talk about at another time soon once the content strategy is nailed.
  5. Measure it. Once the content is up then you need to understand how successful it’s been for it’s target audience. This is done by the same process as step 1. You need to have tracking and analytics set up so you can see the number of visitors you’ve had, where they’ve come from and what actions they’ve undertaken.

I appreciate that I’ve simplified what is actually a very complex thing to do. Essentially, what I’m working to achieve is to create content that will be useful, interesting, engaging, helpful and understandable for the people that read it. It would also be wonderful if they share it (a true litmus test of if you’re getting it right). In this sense, it’s a win:win. Readers of this blog will hopefully get information they need and want and I in turn will raise the profile and awareness of LiquidSimplicity. Happy days!

I’d love it if this was a 2 way creation so if there’s anything that you’d like to know more about, please let me know and I’ll do all I can to help.


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Categories : Content, Planning, SEO, Social media, Strategy


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