Search Marketing Centre

Keyword Research

Choosing the right keywords is always the first step in optimising a site for search engines. The right keywords or phrases will not only make it easier for people (and potential customers) to find your site, but also help a site to rank better on search engines. However, those who are new to SEO often don’t spend enough time on keyword analysis and research – most are either too daunted by the task or feel that they can get away with just throwing in keywords that sound “right”. This lack of research invariably leads to a doomed SEO campaign..

There are three basic steps in keyword research: finding the core keyword, then performing vertical and lateral keyword analysis.

Core keywords

The “core” keyword is the top level, general keyword used to describe the overall theme of the site. For example, an online bookstore can use the word “book” or “books” as the core keyword. Core terms are generally easy to determine even without using specific tools or methods. Practice caution when deciding to add broad search terms to your keyword list – top level keywords are often used sparingly in SEO campaigns due to high competition.

Vertical keyword analysis

Vertical keywords analysis derives keywords from variations that occur from the top level keyword. At its most basic, this process involves adding extensions to the core keywords with adjectives, verbs, nouns and so on. Using the previous online bookstore example, the top level keyword “books” can be expanded so we have the following key phrases:

  • Horror books
  • Self-help books
  • Romance books
  • Recipe books
  • Sydney books

The obvious disadvantage of this stab-in-the-dark approach is that there is no way to tell whether these keywords are regularly used as search terms. A better way of conducting vertical keyword analysis is to use one of the many free keyword suggestion tools online, such as the Overture Keyword Selector Tool, KeywordDiscovery and WordTracker. These tools suggest related keywords as well as how often they have been used as search terms. A search query for “books” on KeywordDiscovery produces the following result:

 

Keyword Discovery Tool results

The results shows key phrases related to “books”, sorted by how frequently they are used as search terms. Key phrases related to the website can then be taken from this list, such as “harry potter books” and “half price books”. If you would like to add niche key phrase to your list e.g. “progressive jazz books”, the keyword tools are useful in finding out whether the key phrase (or its variant) is likely to generate hits. Bear in mind however that results from online keyword tools are estimates.

Lateral keyword Analysis

Lateral keyword analysis is similar to vertical analysis in that it finds related keywords, but keywords generated through lateral analysis does not necessarily contain the core term in them. For example, lateral keywords from the core keyword “books” can be a popular author’s name – “salman rushdie” or the title of a book (e.g. “the satanic verses”). Online lateral keyword tools work by analysing a number of related website and extracting keywords from titles and meta tags. Lateral keywords can also be derived from products available on a website to target a specific audience.

OK, I have a bunch of keywords – which ones do I use?

The keyword list in your SEO campaign should be a balance of the popularity of the keyword as a search term (i.e. how many times they are searched for in a period of time) and competition (the number of results generated by search engines for the keyword). Unless you are planning to invest a massive amount of time and effort into your campaign, it’s advisable to avoid highly competitive keywords. “Books” for example generates 684,000,000 results on Google with Google Books and Amazon.Com being the first two results – it’s unlikely that a small online bookstore will be able to compete with these large sites.

In most cases it’s best to have one or two general, somewhat competitive keyword (usually vertical keywords) as your main keyword and use more specific, less competitive keywords as secondary keywords to fill the rest of your keyword quota.

So, what happens now?

After optimising your site with the chosen keywords, some sort of tracking should be implemented to determine whether the keywords are performing in accordance to the goals set for the SEO campaign. Tools such as Google Analytics can track what keywords people are using to find the site.

Keywords in a campaign can be used to either generate hits (traffic to the website) or conversions (sales or leads). Sometimes one keyword will serve both purposes, other times you may find that different keywords generate highly different responses. For example, our bookstore may get more hits from the general keyword “books”, but more sales with the key phrase “harry potter and the deathly hallows”. Analytics allows you to set up “goals” within the website so you can determine which keywords generate more favourable results than others.

Once you have a couple of month’s worth of data, you may find that you’ll need to revamp your keyword list completely. This is a recurring process, although you will eventually end up with a list of effective keywords that only needs minor tweaking every now and again.

Conclusion

Keyword research is the first step in conducting a successful SEO campaign. Vertical and lateral keyword analyses not only help you to generate more keywords from permutations of the core keyword, but also to get a “snapshot” of users’ search patterns. While the keyword research process can be quite tedious, a good list of keyword goes a long way in helping your site to rank.