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Selecting and Evaluating Keyphrases for
Search Engine Marketing
© 2003
by Scott Buresh
Many businesses recognize that search engines can bring
volumes of highly targeted prospects to their website,
typically at a fraction of the cost of traditional
marketing.
Unfortunately, these same companies often overlook the most
important part of their search engine marketing campaigns,
which is keyphrase selection and evaluation.
Keyphrases (those phrases that potential customers are using
to find products or services on search engines) are the
building block of any search engine marketing strategy.
It is essential that they are chosen carefully, or else the
remainder of the campaign, no matter how effective the
implementation, will likely be in vain. What follows
is a three-step process that goes over the process of
compiling, selecting, and evaluating the ongoing performance
of keyphrases for search engines.
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1. Compiling a keyphrase list:
Usually, companies are sure that they already know their
ideal keyphrases. Often, they are wrong. This is
typically because it is very hard to separate oneself from a
business and look at it from the perspective of a potential
customer (rather than an insider). Compiling a
keyphrase list should not be, despite common practice, a
strictly internal process. Rather, it is best to ask
everyone outside of your company for their input, especially
your customers. People are often very surprised at the
keyphrase suggestions they get- and sometimes dismayed to
realize that an average customer doesn't speak the same
language that they do. Only after you have put
together a list of likely phrases from external sources do
you add your own. As a last step, try to add
variations, plurals, and derivatives of the phrases on your
list.
2. Evaluating keyphrases:
Once you have compiled a master keyphrase list, it is
time to evaluate each phrase to hone your list down to those
most likely to bring you the highest amount of quality
traffic.
Although many individuals will base their assessment of
keyphrase value based only on popularity figures, there are
really three vitally important aspects of each phrase to
consider.
Popularity
By far the easiest of the three to judge is popularity,
since it is not subjective. Software like WordTracker
gives popularity figures of search phrases based upon actual
search engine activity (it also gives additional keyphrase
suggestions and variations). Such software allows you to
assign a concrete popularity number to each phrase to use
when comparing them. Obviously, the higher the number,
the more traffic that can be expected (assuming you are able
to obtain good search engine positions). However, this
number alone is not good enough reason to pursue any
particular keyphrase,
although too often keyphrase analysis stops here.
Specificity
This is more abstract than the sheer popularity number, but
equally important. For example, let's assume that you
were able to obtain great rankings for the keyphrase
"insurance companies" (a daunting prospect).
Let's also assume that you only deal with auto insurance.
Although "insurance companies" might have a much
higher popularity figure than "auto insurance
companies", the first keyphrase would also be comprised
of people looking for life insurance, health insurance, and
home insurance. It is very likely that someone searching for
a particular type of insurance will refine their search
after seeing the disparate results returned from the phrase
"insurance companies". In the second,
longer keyphrase, you can be reasonably sure that a much
higher percentage of visitors will be looking for what you
offer- and the addition of the word "auto" will
make it much easier to attain higher rankings, since the
longer term will be less
competitive.
Motivation of User
This factor, even more abstract than specificity, calls for
an attempt to understand the motivation of a search engine
user by simply analyzing his or her search phrase.
Assume, for example, that you were a real estate agent in
Atlanta. Two of the keyphrases you are evaluating are
"Atlanta real estate listings" and "Atlanta
real estate agents". Both phrases have very
similar popularity numbers. They are also each fairly
specific, and your services are very relevant to each.
So which phrase is better? If you look into the likely
motivation of the user, you will probably conclude that the
second is superior. While both phrases target people
looking for real estate in Atlanta, you can infer from the
second phrase that the searcher has moved beyond the point
where they are browsing local homes or checking out prices
in their neighbourhood- they are looking for an agent, which
implies that they are ready to act. Often, subtle
distinctions between terms can make a large difference on
the quality of
the traffic they attract.
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3. Evaluating Keyphrase Performance:
Until recently, judging the performance of individual
keyphrases was a dicey proposition. Although it is
possible to tell from your log traffic analysis how many
visitors are getting to your site from each keyphrase
(valuable information, but unfortunately not enough to do
much with), it was very hard to decipher which phrases were
bringing you the most quality traffic. Recently,
however, some sophisticated but affordable tools have been
developed that allow you to judge the performance of each
individual keyphrase based upon visitor behavior. This
new software makes it possible to periodically analyze which
keyphrases are bringing your site the most valuable
visitors- those who buy your products, fill out your contact
form, download your demo, etc. This type of data,
rather than the sheer number of visitors from each search
phrase alone, is invaluable when you are refining your
search engine marketing campaigns, since you can discard and
replace non-performing keyphrases and put increased effort
toward the phrases that are delivering visitors that become
customers. This kind of ongoing analysis is the final
piece of the keyphrase puzzle, and allows you to continually
target the most important phrases for your industry, even if
they change over time.
Conclusion:
Keyphrase compilation, evaluation, and performance are all
vitally important to any search engine marketing campaign.
While high rankings in search engines are an admirable goal,
high rankings for poor keyphrases will consistently deliver
poor results. Integration of this keyphrase process
into your overall search engine marketing strategy can
dramatically improve your website performance (and thus your
bottom line).
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Scott Buresh is Co-founder and Principal of
http://www.mediumblue.com
Internet Marketing. For monthly tips on how to get the most
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