Choosing the Right Keyword Phrases for Optimizing your Website
 

When starting a search marketing campaign, the keyword analysis portion of your search marketing campaign is extremely important. It is important to know your short term and long term goals for the keywords that you choose. Using a combination of these, you can keep your long term (most important) keyword phrases in focus while still incorporating some short term phrases into the marketing mix.

I've been performing keyword analysis since 2001, and since this was part of my main job in addition to working on client websites, I always paid a little closer attention to the keywords and ones that will drive traffic to your site (qualified traffic I must note).

Working on different campaigns through out the years, one thing that the majority of people/clients wanted was the almighty top single keyword in their field in a span of 3-4 months. In the article below, I break up the focus on the keyword analysis for a site into two sections. A long term and a short term focus. Why? With the long term goals, these are the top keyword phrases within each competitors field. These are the top ones that will drive the most traffic and bring them to the top of their field. This will take time to achieve and this is where the short term keyword goals are taken into account. With the free organic search engine listings, early in a websites campaigns, they can't compete on the top level of the well establish websites in their field yet, so this is where keyword phrases that can be achieved in the short run are focus on as well. We need to find the best keyword phrases that will result into sales leads. Now onto the article.

What About Single Keywords?

For this example, a local flower shop from Philadelphia will be the site used. Now, it is common for people to expect to rank for a keyword phrase such as flower or flowers. Using the Overture Keyword Selector Tool, if you do a search for flower, it returns 2,057,021 searches for the month of July 2005. Sounds good right?

The Competition

Now, we would want to see exactly how many pages/(sites) actually have this keyword. Using Google and searching for the keyword in double quotes, we get 26,800,000 pages that have that phrase. Why do we search for the keyword in double quotes? This is so we can find the exact number of pages or sites that have this keyword/phrase. Now, just looking at the first two websites and checking their link popularity from Googles index, the first site has just over 345 incoming links from Google and 15,300 links showing in Yahoo, and the second site has over 450 incoming links from Google, and then 7,530 links in Yahoo. Also Google does not display the entire list of links for websites as you may have noticed, it only shows a snapshot.

It is common for people relatively new to search engine marketing for the top keyword phrases in their market. For example, a flower shop Philadelphia, might want to rank for the keyword flower shop. It is understandable, but you have to be realistic. The top sites in the search engines today that rank for keywords such as flowers, have been around for sometime, and have extensive incoming links and well establish sites. If your site is relatively new or have not had an extensive marketing campaign in the past, it is going to take awhile to get that top keyword.

More Numbers & Data

Setting Goals for Short Term and Long Term

In Google, when searching for flower shop, there are just under 1 million sites returned. You will need to have a short term goal with a keyword such as flower shop Philadelphia. This still incorporates the main keyword, which is our long term goal, plus it offers us a more targeted keyword on our location. For the phrase flower shop Philadelphia, there are just over 700 sites with that exact phrase. So you will want to have a range of keywords that meet both your short and long term goals. The great thing about targeting the short term goals, is that the keywords tend to be more targeted to the actual products and/or services that you may be offering, and provide a return on your investment.

It is important to have a good understanding and realistic expectations with SEO and choosing keyword phrases. With organic (free listings) results, it will not happen overnight. If you are looking for instant results, then you will need to incorporate PPC into your monthly/yearly budget to help supplement the traffic and sales when your business is just starting off.

Gerard Manning
Canadian Search Engine Marketing :: Manning Search Marketing