Think Like a Searcher to Increase Your Traffic - Keys to Keywords
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Do you know what keywords searchers use to find what you offer? Fortunately, you can find that out. If you're signed up to use Google Webmaster Tools, you can get a very useful report that shows you the most searched terms vs. the most clicked terms for a page of your site. Look for it in the Statistics menu; it's called "top search queries."
Say you have a page that turns up frequently for the search term "plus size clothing" but doesn't get a lot of click-throughs for that term. The page is underperforming. Why? That's what you need to find out. It's quite possible that your page titles and descriptions aren't enticing enough to searchers.
While we're on the topic of keywords, though, let's back up a moment. You're not surprised that your web page turns up for "plus size clothing" because you optimized it for that term. But are you getting fewer searches for that term than you expected? Could it be that the searchers you're hoping to reach don't use that term anymore?
This brings up an important issue. If you're going to reach people, you have to do it in their language - and that's especially true when they're looking for you. This is where keyword research comes in. Many SEOs use WordTracker to help with this. While you have to pay for full access, you can sign up for a free trial of the tool. One of the most useful things you can do with the tool is enter a general term, like "clothing," and watch it give you a list of related keywords, ranked by popularity.
If you don't want to sign up for WordTracker's free trial, it also offers a free keyword suggestion tool. Put in a keyword and it generates up to 100 related keywords with an estimate of their daily search volume. Here's a screen shot (cropped to fit, of course) of the result I received when I put the word "costume" into this free tool:
The list goes on, of course; "superhero costumes" shows up at the bottom of the list, with 96 daily searches. Now if you search for superhero costumes in Google, you'll find 188,000 results - not too much competition, comparatively speaking. Time to stock up on Spandex, perhaps?
Google also has a free keyword suggestion tool. It covers searches on Yahoo for the last month. And it will give you suggestions that are different from WordTracker's, or at least in a different order.
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