Keyword Selection

Prior to reading the following section, you may wish to read the background information:

• Organic versus Sponsored search engine results

• Google and SEO - relationship of search engine ranging and Google business requirements

• White Hat and Black Hat SEO - Comparison of the two different approaches to SEO

Prior to starting SEO, the first step is to determine which phrases (which are known as 'keywords') that you want to appear in the search engines for. This task actually involves a fair amount of thought and investigation. The basic process is:

• Keyword List. One can begin by writing a list of all the keywords that you would like to appear in the search engines for.

• List Evaluation. The next step is to look at each keyword and evaluate it in terms of two items. The first item is to determine the amount of traffic there is for the keyword, which allows you to rank the keywords in order of traffic importance (the keywords with the most traffic are the most important to rank well for). The second is to evaluate for each keyword how much work there is to rank well for it.

• Keyword Prioritization. In your keyword list there could easily be a hundred terms that you would like to appear in the search engines for. However, obtaining a good rank takes investment, and a number of these terms may not bring sufficient traffic to justify the investment. Furthermore, even for the terms which you are willing to invest in, you should prioritize and it is virtually impossible to work on all simultaneously unless you have huge resources at your disposal.

Keyword List: Words versus Phrases

To illustrate how one creates a keyword list, we will use the example of a website selling real estate in France. Please keep this example in mind when reading the following text.

For this example, the immediately obvious keywords are items such as 'property', 'real estate', 'France' and 'French'. These can also be combined into phrases such as 'French property' and 'property in France'. In general, most website owners should focus on ranking for keyword phrases rather than for keywords. It is true that ranking well for 'French' will give a thousand times as much traffic as ranking well for 'French Property'. However, it would cost a hundred times as much investment to rank for 'French' as to rank for 'French Property' simply because there is so much more competition for individual words as there is for phrases. Furthermore, most of the traffic for 'French' is for topics (such as French Revolution, French Flag, French Food) largely irrelevant to the example business, so the majority of the traffic is of no value to the example business. Consequently, in the vast majority of cases, you get far better return on your investment by focusing on relevant keyword phrases (known as 'targeted keyword phrases') than by doing SEO for individual keywords.

A related point to keep in mind is that ranking well for individual keywords does not mean that one will automatically rank well for phrases made up of these keywords. For example, a site could rank well for 'French' (perhaps resulting in lots of traffic about 'French Food') and rank well for 'Property' (perhaps resulting in lots of traffic for 'Australian Property'), without ranking well for 'French Property' (which is what this website owner really needs). In fact, very targeted keyword phrases, are often the best investments in terms of obtaining visitors who are searching for the precise product that you are offering. So if you are selling mansions in France you may find the best SEO investment is 'Prestige French Property' whereas if you are selling run-down farmhouses to people looking for inexpensive holiday homes they can fix up you may find the best SEO investment is 'Cheap French Farmhouses'. Admittedly the amount of traffic for these lengthy phrases is low, but the probability of the resulting visitors buying is much higher than for more general phrases and the cost of SEO for such phrases is a small fraction of the cost for more general phrases.

There will of course be cases when ranking for individual words makes sense. For example, a website which provides international property rather than property in just one country may find it cost effective to rank for 'property'. Likewise, websites that are focused on niche topics that are identified by a single word. However, for the majority of websites, keyword phrases are not only more cost effective but also tend to deliver the specific type of visitors that match the products you are selling.

Keyword List: Building the List

Building a keyword list starts with listing the obvious words and phrases. However, it is often the case that there are similar words and phrases that do not immediately come to mind. For example, if one is selling real estate, terms such as 'real estate' and 'property' are obvious. However, there are a number of less obvious phrases (such as 'secluded house', 'prestige property', 'large property', 'property with land', 'vacation property'), some of which may carry a surprising amount of traffic. Thinking of such search phrases can often be difficult, but fortunately there are a number of software tools that can help. For the novice, two of the best are Keyword Tracker and Word Tracker. Both of these charge a monthly fee, but they also offer free trials; the trial software has a number of limitations, but can provide you with a good start without spending any money. They provide different but complimentary types of information, so it is best to use both rather than one or the other.

There are of course many other tools. Also, there are specialized professionals with years of experience in this area who can identify useful phrases which the average person or tool may not. However, the above tools are a good start.

Keyword List: Evaluation

Once you have your list of keywords and keyword phrases, you need to decide which ones are of interest. There are a number of factors which you will use to decide this, but the main ones are:

• Traffic Size. The more search traffic a keyword has, the more interesting it is. The above two tools will give a rough estimate of the amount of traffic for any given keyword. Unfortunately, none of the tools for measuring search traffic are 100% accurate and different tools give somewhat different answers. However, one can use the tools to get a rough idea.

• Traffic Relevance. As discussed above, the relevance of traffic to your business is as importance as the amount. This is essentially a judgment call; you need to look at the products you are selling and decide how relevant the various phrases are. In particular, is a visitor using a given keyword phase more likely to purchase a product than a visitor using another keyword phrase. Obviously it is impossible to determine this with accuracy in advance, but it is impossible to prioritize keyword phrases without first making a rough estimate. On the positive side, once your website starts generating business, there are tools to determine not only how many visitors each keyword is giving you, but also how many buyers you get from each keyword.

• Keyword Cost. The final factor is the cost of getting a good rank for each keyword. Given that two keywords may generate approximately the same amount of relevant traffic but may have completely different SEO costs, this is an important consideration. General keywords normally cost most than specialized keywords and short keyword phrases cost more than long keyword phrases. This is because the more general a keyword is, the more competing websites there are which you have to beat. Both the tools above given an indication of the relative competition for each keyword; for this purpose the Keyword Tracker tool is the better of the two but it provides this information only in the paid version.

Unfortunately, this is a far from precise exercise. However, like many aspects of business, one must use the available tools, combined with one's own business knowledge and judgment, to make the required decisions.

Keyword List: Priority

If you do SEO yourself, it takes a certain amount of your time. If done by SEO professionals, it costs a certain amount of money. Consequently, rather than try to rank for every possible keyword of interest, one should begin with the keywords which give the best return on time and money. As your business matures and generates revenue, you may wish to invest in SEO on additional terms.

The task of deciding which keywords to start with is based on the information from the previous activity (traffic, relevance, cost). There are two different approaches that can be taken. One is simply to prioritize on the basis of best return on investment, which in mathematical terms is: traffic * relevance divided by cost. Alternatively, if getting your business up and running as soon as possible is as important as return on investment, then you may select the keywords which have an acceptable return on investment and then prioritize them from least difficult (can get a good ranking in minimum time) to most difficult (takes longer to get a good ranking).

Once you have ordered your keywords by priority, you can start work on SEO your keywords.