Keyword Analysis
Posted by Jim Mueller on Sat, Feb 27, 2010 @ 12:06 AM
Today we discuss the process of keyword analysis or keyword research...thse two terms are used interchangeably. Any sound inbound marketing strategy will start with this step because it is the most important part of the entire process. The keywords you identify from this process will drive most everything you do online.
Full Video Transcript
Hey, everybody. Jim Mueller with SEOAnswers. A question of the day is what exactly is keyword research, keyword analysis? So, let’s jump right in. Typically, I’ll ask my clients to give me five core keywords and these are words, phrases that best describe the products and services that they sell. Also, what they think their perspective customers are typing into Google, looking for products and services that they sell. So once I get those core phrases, then I’ll begin to look for all the alternatives, the synonyms, variations, the plural versus the singular and come up with an exhaust of list which can become quite extensive. But we would want to look at all the choices before we get started.
The next thing we want to look at is the search volume. So, why is this important? Well, it’s important to know the size of the market that you’re going after. So, if you’re going to spend time and money trying to get rank for these phrases, you need to know how many people are searching for those phrases. So for example, executive coaching gets about 60,500 searches a month. Now, executive coach gets about a third of that. So, I didn’t know that and I know my client didn’t know that before we did the research. So that’s why it’s important to do this. Another example is certified executive coach so you look at that and it only gets 210 searches a month. So I definitely didn’t know that until we did the research. So, it’s important to know.
The other reason it’s important to know is if somebody is looking to hire an SEO company to get them ranked, a lot of times these companies will say, “What phrases do you want to get ranked for?” And if I’m a certified executive coach, I’ll say, “Hey, I would love to be ranked on the first page of Google for that phrase.” That company will say, “Okay.” And then $2000 later, you’re on page one of Google for this phrase but it only has 210 searches a month which you probably didn’t know and you’re not going to get all those searches. You’re only going to get a percentage and unbeknownst to you, you probably could have gotten ranked on page one of Google with just a few blog posts based on a term like that. It just depends on how competitive it is but sometimes you got to know the search volume, how competitive it is before you know how much you need to spend on SEO.
The next thing we look at is the number of competing pages. So, we basically want to know how competitive these phrases are. And one of the quick ways to determine that is to look at the number of competing pages. So, if we take executive coaching, we do a search in Google for that, here we see results one through 10 of about 1,160,000 competing pages. So, this number gives me an idea of how competitive that phrase is and then use that information to make a recommendation to my client.
Another way to determine the competitiveness of a phrase is to look at who is ranking on the page one. So let’s go look at the websites and I’ll look at how many backlinks they have, how long has the site been around, what’s the page rank and I’ll take all these things into consideration. I’ll also look at, you know, the last position number 10 because if you’re going to get on page one of Google, you have to at least knock off number 10. Right? So, we’ll look in number 10 and we’ll see, you know, what their backlinks are, how long they have been around, what their page rank is so we’ll take that all in consideration and before I make my determination.
So, once we get to competing pages, then I kind of have a ratio. This is just my deal where I divide these two numbers and I get a ratio and the lower the ratio, the better. And basically, what it tells me is what’s the best balance and what’s a good word to go after. Typically, the more search volume, the more competition. Once in a while, you will find a phrase with a decent amount of search volume. Not so much competition. Then this ratio here is going to be low. That might be a phrase we’re going to go after.
So, once we do all this analysis, what comes out of that is a list of keyword phrases that I call – or keyword palette and this is a list of phrases for my clients to choose from when they’re writing blog posts, when they’re doing their title tags, meta descriptions, writing a press release. They’re always going to want to be cognizant of these keyword phrases and work those in to their marketing materials, their website, their content, their blog articles and so forth. So, you can see how important it is to do this analysis up front.
And then out of that, we’re going to do those title tags, meta descriptions and that will be for another video blog post later on. But – so for right now, that’s it on keyword analysis. I hope that helped. Thanks for checking in and I’ll talk to you next time.