I’d like to tip my hat to David de Souza, writing for Search Engine Land on the topic of using these “hidden gems,” as he calls them, to find performing keywords that your rivals haven’t stumbled upon yet. I’m not covering all of his gems here, so by all means, check out his article for the ones I’m missing.

His first suggestion seems counter intuitive at first. You’ve no doubt noticed that many keywords for which you want to rank return searches with a Wikipedia page in the number one spot. They’re not your competitors, and you sure don’t want to try to outrank them! Or do you?

For many pages that you don’t own – especially your regular competitors – you lack some important data necessary for outranking them: the amount of traffic they receive. Interestingly enough, however, that’s not true with Wikipedia pages.  There is a tool to which de Souza links that gives you some excellent information. He notes that it “will allow you to find traffic volume for any Wikipedia page over the last 90 days,” but it actually gives you a bit more than that; you can fiddle around with it and even analyze the popularity of any particular page over a longer period of time.

Why is this useful? When you try a keyword in Google and see a Wikipedia page ranking at the top, you can check the traffic that article receives to see if it’s  worth it to try to outrank that page. One caveat: the fine print on every page of this tool says “This is very much a beta service and may disappear or change at any time,” so I’d recommend finding a spare 10 minutes or so to play around with it reasonably soon.

The second suggestion for keywords off the beaten path takes advantage of a traditional year-end habit of websites in many fields. No, I’m not talking about New Year’s resolutions; I’m talking about most popular posts lists. These can yield all sorts of interesting ideas. Of course, it’s February now, so how do you find those posts if it’s not the right time of year?

You need to create a query for Google that joins several things. The first part will be your niche, the phrase “most popular posts of 2012” (or whatever year has just passed) and the word “traffic.” So if your niche is electronics, your search would look like this: electronics “most popular posts of 2012” traffic.

Okay, so it’s pretty clear why you want the niche and the “most popular posts of 2012;” the niche directs Google and the quotes tell it to look for an exact phrase. But why the traffic? You want to find lists that mention how much traffic the site received. One of the posts that de Souza found in this manner noted that it posted 50 articles during the year and received more than 100,000 visitors. “Using the Pareto principle (the 80/20 rule), we can estimate that the 10 articles listed received around 80,000 visitors,” de Souza notes.

Now here’s where it really gets interesting. You can check out those popular articles to see if you can create better content on those same topics. If you can, you know what to do, right? In fact, if you really want to make your efforts pay off, check out those popular posts to see which ones got links. After you’re created your killer content, send an email to the webmasters of those websites to make them aware of it. You just might get a link, which will certainly help you in your goal of beating the competition.

You should never do one form of keyword research to the exclusion of others. These ideas aren’t meant to take the place of whatever you’re doing now. They’re there to help you when you’re stuck and want to find something different that could still bring in good traffic for your website. Good luck! 

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Terri

The post Keyword Research: Two Unusual Resources appeared first on SEO Chat.

I need to tip my hat once again to Stoney deGeyter at Search Engine Guide. He discusses five steps one needs to take to organically grow one’s search engine ranking. I’m in Central Florida, so right now is a great time to think about growing things (or at least starting them indoors before the last frost). And that gardening metaphor is more than apt.

Think about keywords as you would think about the seeds you use to grow your garden. You may start by thinking about what you’d like to grow, but before you even buy the seeds, you’d research what kinds of plants grow well in your area. For example, I like certain homegrown tomatoes, but if I lived further south I wouldn’t dream of growing them except under specifically controlled conditions; South Florida suffers from a serious nematode problem. Which is a pity, because you’d figure the climate is perfect otherwise…well, as long as you keep in mind that the growing season is different because it gets too hot in the summer for tomatoes to do well. (Big surprise to those of you further north, yes?). And don’t even get me started on the soil consistency…

Now before I take this metaphor too much further, let me explain what I’m trying to point out: if you don’t do your research, you could end up with some really unpleasant surprises. You might want to use a keyword that gets a lot of traffic, but also has a lot of competition. You might want to use one particular keyword for your product, but find that your customers use a totally different word for the same thing. Or you could get some pleasant surprises…like the time I grew a tomato plant and had it last for more than two years, when I’d heard that one usually must replant every year. Not in Florida, apparently, or at least not with that particular plant! But you’re not going to know unless you do the research.

You wouldn’t even begin to create a full-scale garden without researching your plants, and you shouldn’t even begin to create a full-scale website without doing your keyword research. Just like the plants, keywords are the key elements to your website; it’s what the site is all about. Yes, I know, it’s all about content and giving a good experience to the user (and helping you conduct your business, of course), but your content grows from the categories you choose, and those categories are your keywords.

Keywords are like tomatoes; raw or cooked, you can use them in everything. And plenty of people do. This luscious red fruit happily goes into salads, pizza, stews, soups, chili, on burgers (as both tomato slices and ketchup), pasta sauce, and so much more. As deGeyter points out, “keywords can help you build navigation, titles, descriptions, content and blog posts!”

Your keywords help you market your website; they tell everyone what your website is all about. And by “everyone,” I mean the search engines, your visitors, your writers, your suppliers, those who create your product or service, and even you. And that’s why you should get that research done BEFORE you build your website. Because if you don’t, you might find yourself fighting to grow tomatoes in July in South Florida in soil that’s full of nematodes. Good luck!

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Terri

The post How Keywords Help You Grow Your Website appeared first on SEO Chat.

Nick Stamoulis, writing for Search Engine Guide, notes that he runs into that situation all the time. A client wants to rank number one in Google for a particularly competitive keyword because “that’s where the money is.” He tells them that it may be a good long-term goal, but with the level of competition they face, they should consider trying to rank for other, related terms. They’re less competitive (and therefore less lucrative), but still offer good potential. More often than not, the client comes back saying they just want to rank for that one competitive, money-making term, and don’t understand why they should “waste” their time with anything else.

As it turns out, it’s not just individual keywords that are important to making money with a website; it’s keyword diversity. Let me give you an analogy. Say you want to hire someone for a programming position. You’re looking at two applicants. One lists Java, JavaScript, PHP, and HTML among their skills; the other lists these languages plus C, C++, and experience designing smartphone apps. The position you have in mind calls for a diverse range of abilities. You’d be more likely to hire the second one, right? Using more keywords lets searchers know you can do more things for them.

“That’s not realistic! Searchers just do one search to find something, and I want to be at the top for that term!” I hear you complain. Okay, assume for the moment that this is true (which it often isn’t). Say that you’re the first applicant, and you’ve figured out that more employers are looking for PHP programmers than anything else. So you optimize your resume for PHP, and emphasize that over everything else; you don’t even list your other skills, because you really want employers to notice your PHP programming – after all, that’s where the money is, right? That’s fine, until you hit the employer who’s looking for someone skilled in JavaScript. You know JavaScript; you know it well, in fact. But this employer has no way of knowing that because you’ve optimized your resume for PHP and neglected everything else!

Locking yourself into one or just a few limited keywords is like optimizing your resume for only one talent; you miss lots of opportunities for which your services could easily have fit the bill. If you go after a wider (but related) range of keywords, you’ll reach a wider audience. And it doesn’t have to be as different as two different programming languages; it could simply involve using both “cell phones” and “smartphones” to describe a particular kind of mobile device. Remember, searchers looking for the same thing might use slightly different terms; cater to this, and you’ll capture more visitors.

“Okay,” you’re wondering, “but I want to rank number one for ‘widgets’ and there’s not a lot of different ways to say it.” Actually, there are: there are red widgets, blue widgets, articulated widgets, steel widgets, virtual widgets, solar-powered widgets…the list goes on and on. What’s more, someone shopping for a widget may have already done their research, and decided they want a steel, blue, articulated, solar-powered widget. How will they find you?

What’s my point here? Shoppers who are closer to making a purchase use long-tail keywords. If you’re trying to rank for just the word “widget,” you won’t capture them. You serve both them and yourself better when you include the more descriptive terms; they get a better idea of what your products and services are actually like, and you get more targeted traffic.

Finally, let’s take a detour and talk about every SEO’s least favorite flightless bird. Google’s Penguin pecks the heck out of websites “with unnatural link profiles and an overuse of exact-match anchor text,” according to Stamoulis. Well, guess what? If you’re optimizing your link building for very few keywords, the anchor text of your links will look redundant and unnatural. You may have a few hundred links, with four-fifths of them using “widgets” for the anchor text. That’s sure to attract Google’s tuxedoed filter.

If you optimize the anchor text on your links for a greater variety of keywords, however, you diversify your link profile. That makes it look a lot more natural. So instead of 500 links mostly using “widgets” for anchor text, you have 75 that use “widgets,” 30 that use “solar-powered widgets,” 46 using “stainless steel widgets,” five using “widgets and whatchamacallits,” 12 using “measuring widgets,” and so on. You may even include several keywords that don’t mention widgets at all, but use a different word that means the same thing (like notebooks and laptops, or soda and pop).

I hope I’ve convinced you to at least consider expanding your keyword list a little. Limiting your keywords limits your traffic. Limiting your traffic can limit your website’s earning power – and nobody wants that. Good luck!

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Terri

The post Limiting Keywords Limits Your Traffic appeared first on SEO Chat.

As you might expect, the answer to that is “It depends.” This very subject came up in our SEO Chat forums, and you can check out the thread for the full story. Basically, what it boils down to is that there’s a glut in the market for content writers at a certain level – but if you’re really exceptional or hit the right niche, you can do well if you’re prepared to stick with it for long enough.

Let’s start by taking a look at the writer glut. In advising an experienced content writer, highly respected SEO Chat forum member Egol noted that “content for the web has become a commodity. Writers from Asia and some from North America are willing to write for a few cents per word.” Really good writers, however, should insist on their hourly rate; “You don’t want to be a racehorse that pulls a plow,” Egol observed.

But who would be willing to pay a high hourly rate? Think of the kind of people who really need high quality content, and can afford to pay for it. That includes high traffic sites that make lots of money from ad views; professional websites with high value visitors; certain organizations that care about their image and want to project quality, and/or who have an important message they want to get out; and certain others. Egol stated that “Those make up a very tiny percentage of webmasters.”

For a writer, this means that a huge part of the market won’t want or need to pay your rates. One natural answer to this involves specializing in an area that cut-rate writers can’t touch. It’s a great opportunity to serve a well-paying market; as with all opportunities, however, it comes with certain pitfalls.

Reaching higher-paying customers usually means writing for markets looking for highly specialized knowledge. By this I mean professional fields such as law, medicine, finance, and the like – though it could also apply to certain highly skilled trades. Cut-rate writers can’t really touch these fields because they don’t have the background knowledge; they can’t write like someone who knows it inside and out, because they don’t. Visitors to websites that post that kind of information LIVE the subject matter; they’ll quickly spot even subtle mistakes made by a writer who merely researched it. For many high-quality websites, that is simply not acceptable.

This is one of the reasons, by the way, for the oft-repeated advice to bloggers to write what you’re passionate about. If you’re passionate about something, you either know it intimately or are willing to put in the concentrated effort to learn. Also, you’ll never run out of things to write about it!

It’s not just a matter of passion, however. In addition to picking a topic “that you truly enjoy and can write about long-term without fatigue,” Egol notes that “It’ must also be one that you have the ability to produce best-on-the-web content that is useful or entertaining for the reader and technically accurate.” Keep in mind, too, that you may invest a year or two before seeing satisfying results.

As an example, let me point to Dr.Marie. An SEO Chat forum member for two years, she’s also a professional veterinarian with her own pet care website. She makes her money on the site from AdSense. She writes evergreen content, and as a result she gets income even from articles that she published two years ago. In the time she’s been on SEO Chat, as she has applied what she’s learned, she noted that her income from her site went from next to nothing to paying her mortgage. That’s not going to make one rich, of course, but it is a nice side stream.

Keep in mind two things, though: Dr.Marie is in fact a professional veterinarian, which gives her very specialized knowledge. And her niche, pet care, is particularly popular. She has a lot of competition, sure, but she doesn’t have to capture a large percentage of the traffic for that niche to make money. The key is that her knowledge – and writing ability, of course – means that she can offer much better information than many of her competitors.

What does this mean for you, the passionate writer trying to figure out the best way to earn money from doing what you love? How do you decide your niche? How do you know you can write best-of-the-web content for it? Ask yourself what any responsible web master with a demanding audience would ask: what qualifies you to write this content? Remember, Dr.Marie has formal qualifications in her area. That may not be required for your particular niche, but your audience – and anyone who publishes what you’ve written, if you’re also trying to sell your work elsewhere – will want to know, and they will spot even the most subtle errors.

If you don’t have formal qualifications, what should you do to determine whether you can compete in a particular niche? It’s actually somewhat simple, according to Egol: “Can you pick subjects, search Google for that topic, and know that you can defeat the content of every site currently positioned on the first page? That means better writing, more detail, better graphics, better everything.” Now, if you want to make income from that, you need to be able to it at least once or twice a week, and hold that pace for a couple of years, until your site gains traction.

This is why you need to be careful picking your niche. Remember, also, that your competition might not be made up of devoted amateurs, depending on the topic. As Egol explained, especially when you’re writing for a professional audience, “you are not competing against people who are sitting at a card table in their basement typing on a cheap laptop. In many niches your competitors are teams of people who have support staffs to help them.”

Say that you do decide to start building your own content website. Obviously you need to think about your own background when choosing your niche, but what should you look for? Egol offered some suggestions, which I’ll include here. You want a niche with high search volume, because if you are monetizing with ads you’ll need to show a lot of ads to make money. You also want one with competition, because “if there is competition there is generally a lot of money changing hands and a lot of volume,” Egol pointed out, and you needn’t fear any competition you can beat.

You should also look for topics that will attract a lot of subscribers and repeat visitors; in fact, if you can, try to hook people in with an RSS feed or email subscription. Egol recommends building a theme site (such as Dr.Marie’s, which is focused around pet care); that way, it can become the go-to place for those who have problems or questions, or just need information. When writing for your site, look for evergreen topics; you may not want to build a site around a flash-in-the-pan celebrity who will be yesterday’s news in a few months, for example.

Egol also recommends writing about a topic that is closely tied to things that people buy. He uses the example of home repair, where you show them how to fix something and they need to buy the tools and the materials. “If the ads can be as valuable to the visitor as the content that is where you will make the most money,” Egol explained.

Make no mistake, building your own content-based website is a lot of work, and even if you do everything right, it will take some time before it starts paying off. But it could be one of the best gambles you ever make. Good luck!

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Terri

The post Sell Your Writing or Build Your Own Site? appeared first on SEO Chat.

It’s a basic rule of SEO: searchers enter the same terms into search engines that they use in everyday language to describe what they need. If you don’t use those terms on your website, it won’t come up for those searches. This means you’ll get less traffic from the search engines, and fewer conversions.

If you want to win over your audience, you need to speak their language. Fortunately, even bloggers who write corporatese like a native can stop incentivising their buzzwords long enough to see a real ROI. Seriously, Neil Patel offered some great tips at Search Engine Journal for using social media to help you get that common touch.

Start by reading the language in all the right places. Don’t go to industry blogs; they’re full of the buzzwords you want to avoid. Instead, visit Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn. Find out what words people use when they’re posting and commenting about products and services in your field. Read relevant blogs, and check out forums. Make note of the language posters use to ask and answer questions. Seek out websites with user-generated reviews, and study the words they use. Write down specific keywords and key phrases.

Another way you can find out your audience’s language is by searching for trending hash tags on Twitter. You’ll often find these cropping up during a conference or similar event. Pay attention to the language used in these tweets to get a feel for relevant topics, words and phrases.

One of the most direct ways to find out the language your audience speaks, of course, is to ask them. “Interviewing people from your target market will be the best way to learn about their needs, what they think of your product and brand, and, most importantly, the language they use,” Patel notes. You can interview people in your target market in various ways: in person, over the phone, or even via email.

When you conduct these interviews, Patel reminds you to do four things. First, target your interviewees carefully, choosing several people from each of your market segments. Second, ask a lot of specific questions; you want to get exact language, not just a vague idea of what they think of your brand and products. Third, make sure you interview enough people over a period of time; what you learn from these interviews can fuel future blog posts. And finally, use appropriate tools to help you. “Open up Excel, create columns for each target market, and drop in these themes and common words and phrases,” Patel suggests.

Finally, don’t take your own people for granted. Some of them already speak the language of your customers, out of necessity. I’m talking about anyone who deals directly with your customers. These include customer service reps, sales reps, retail reps, and even social media reps. Sit down and talk with these people. They can tell you what your customers are saying, and how they are saying it. Ask them to tell you what words and phrases your customers and audience are using, and what language will resonate with them.

Going forward, make a commitment to using this language on your website, in your blog posts, and anywhere your target audience will see it. A good relationship starts with both parties speaking the same language; you can’t expect your customers to start speaking your language, so you need to make the effort to start speaking theirs. Good luck!

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Terri

The post Learn to Speak Your Audience`s Language appeared first on SEO Chat.

Sujan Patel wrote a fascinating article on this topic for Search Engine Journal. After explaining how Google figures out what searchers mean when they enter keywords, he discussed five steps you can take in your keyword research that will help you get found more often by your target audience.

I’m unspeakably grateful that we’re passed the days when optimizing your keywords meant “pick a single target keyword and cram it into your web content as many times as you can,” as Patel characterizes the obsolete style. He correctly notes that “That ship has sailed.” Thanks in part to Google’s Penguin update, the search engine is better at spotting keyword stuffing. But more importantly, Google “understands” words used in context better than it used to.

Patel used the word “fan” as an example. Most searchers don’t use a single keyword anymore; they’ll put in several, which gives Google some kind of context. It knows that “stargate fan site” is not the same thing as “industrial fan review.” Because of this, it can return relevant results to searchers.

But it goes deeper than just returning websites with the specific phrase. Patel notes that “Google and the other search engines use their semantic indexing capabilities to pull results from related SERPs” and deliver the goods. What does this mean? A searcher entering the phrase “industrial fan review” will see results for that phrase, but the search engine might also include results for the phrases “industrial fan comparison,” “industrial fan guide” or “commercial fan review,” among others, to ensure relevance.

Does this mean that your website will show up for related phrases that you haven’t necessarily targeted? Quite possibly, but wouldn’t it be better to target those phrases anyway? Of course it would. The good news is, you can use the search engines’ own semantic indexing behaviors to help you do your research and plan your content around keyword phrases.

We’ll start by building what Patel referred to as “Level 1” core keywords. These are keywords that vary from our target phrase only slightly, without straying far from its meaning. We’ll enlist Google’s help for this task. Just put your key phrase into Google, and wait for the results to display. Then look at the left-hand sidebar; you’ll find a link for “Related searches.” Hit that, and Google will generate a list, complete with links. When Patel tried it for “industrial fan review,” he got 15 slightly different key phrase, including “industrial fan guide,” “”drum fan review,” “industrial fan manual,” and more.

Not all of these may be relevant, so you may want to click through to check any that look a little questionable. One “related search” Google suggested was “industrial fan lyrics;” that key phrase sounds a lot more like it’s related to music than commercial fans! But that caveat aside, the advantage of starting your keyword research this way is that Google recognizes all of these phrases as semantically related; you know it does, because it just said so. Patel notes that this makes them “a powerful starting point for our keyword research.”

Once you have your Level 1 core keywords, you need to create a list of supporting keywords. Imagine why someone might be searching on the phrase “industrial fan review.” They’re probably shopping for a fan and want to compare what’s out there. If they’re shopping for a fan, they probably have some kind of heating and/or cooling need. They might even need to dry a wet area of their machine shop. “By brainstorming the reasons search users might have for entering our particular target keyword into the engines, we can compile a whole new list of keywords related to our main phrase,” Patel explained.

If you incorporate into your content key phrases like “how to cool shop,” “overheated shop,” “cooling machinery” and so on, you might even capture searchers before they try the phrase “industrial fan review.” That gets them earlier in their buying cycle, and may help your site rank higher in the SERPs.

There’s one final level of keyword phrases we need to examine. Patel refers to these as Level 3 stem keywords. With our level 1 core keywords, we considered what Google thought was directly relevant to one of our target key phrases. With our level 2 keywords, we tried to understand searchers’ motives BEFORE they entered that core key phrase. With level 3 keywords, we going to think about the kinds of questions a user might ask AFTER they’ve used a core keyword, and figure out how to answer them.

So if a searcher lands on your industrial fan website after searching for the phrase “industrial fan review,” and has read some content to help him with his problem, what is his next logical question? It might be “How do I buy a fan?” It’s easy to build key phrases around this: “buy industrial fan,” “how to purchase shop fans,” and “where to buy commercial fans” are a few examples. But he might also need to know how to get the system up and running, and how to use it. So “industrial fan set up,” “how to use industrial fan,” or even “build a commercial fan” might be relevant key phrases you can use.

All right, you’ve now collected three different levels of keyword phrases. What do you do with them? Here’s where the magic begins. By pulling keyword phrases from these lists, you can begin outlining content appropriate for your website. Patel recommends starting with one level 1 keyword phrase, and pulling one or two key phrases from your level 2 and level 3 lists.

Patel took these four phrases for his example: “industrial fan guide” (our level 1 phrase), “how to cool shop” (a level 2 phrase), “overheated shop” (another level 2 phrase), and “buy industrial fan” (a level 3 phrase). You can easily use these four key phrases in an article titled “The Complete Industrial Fan Guide.” In this article, you could discuss how to use fans to cool an overheated shop, and how to buy them for this purpose. Patel notes that “Touching on all of these different points will improve the search engines’ understanding of your site, as well as open you up to potential SERPs exposure for a much wider variety of keyword phrases.

Let me make one final point. The content you’re writing may be built around keywords; nevertheless, you should not forget for whom you’re actually creating it – your website’s HUMAN visitors. It should be readable, informative, and engaging. If it sounds stilted, you need to rework and rethink what you’ve written.

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Terri

The post Using Semantics for Keyword Research appeared first on SEO Chat.

I first discussed mining the results of your site’s search engine for possible keywords late last month. In that article, I mentioned that keywords entered into your site’s search engine can tell you what areas of content you might want to consider adding to your site. Clearly, if someone is searching for certain information on your site, they want and expect to find it there. Give your visitors what they want, and they’ll stick around for a while. They may even come back for more.

While you’re using your site search analytics to discover new keywords, however, you need to keep your eyes open to certain other patterns that might manifest in the searches. Mike Fleming notes that they’ll tell you what users are looking for, all right, and it isn’t always content in the usual sense. It could be that certain parts of your website are simply hard to find.

As an example, he points to some pattern analysis he did on the search terms being used on a medical-related website. He discovered that one of the most common queries was “enter your search term here.” Apparently a lot of visitors were clicking on the search box without entering a search term. Why would they do that?

Looking at the rest of the terms used, there seems to be a good reason for that. It appears the site might be tricky to navigate. Three of the top 25 searches were some form of “log in,” which could indicate that users are having trouble finding the login prompt. Another couple of the top 25 search terms are variations on “system requirements.” That seems to indicate that this site offers some kind of software but makes it difficult to find what systems it runs on – which could lead to lost sales.

Another couple of top search terms were “ipad” and “mobile.” This could mean that users were looking for apps for their devices, and not finding them. This raises two questions: first, are there mobile apps on the website for users to find? And if so, why aren’t they just navigating to them?

You may be wondering how this fits into doing keyword research. Well, if you’re dealing with site structure issues, it still relates back to keywords; the two feed each other. When you divide your website into categories and subcategories to make it easier for visitors to find your offerings, you’re (ideally) thinking in terms of keywords. That’s how a visitor will approach your site. Getting these kinds of searches lets you know that you need to think even more like a visitor to make them happy.

Whether you’re looking at your site search analytics to discover new areas to expand your website into, or digging into other issues, the key is to look for patterns. These patterns, Fleming notes, “will give insight into what’s going on with your visitors.” This is where you start asking questions to find out why searchers are using the keywords they are.

So how do you do this for your own site? Well, there are a number of ways you can group the searches on your site to see what patterns emerge. You might start with synonyms. “Grouping synonyms allows you to see how popular different subjects are with your visitors and the kinds of words they use to find what they’re looking for,” Fleming explains. You might also examine the search terms to see what kind of questions they’re trying to ask (such as “Where is the login prompt?” when you get variations of a search for “login”). You can also take the reverse approach and consider what kind of content they want to find given their queries (such as mobile apps when they search for “ipad” and “mobile”).

You might also look at the language used in your site search box and see how it matches the language of your website. Do you use a lot of field-specific jargon when your visitors search using more general terms – or vice versa? Such information can inspire a rethinking of your target audience and a possible rewriting of at least some of  your content.

Depending on your website’s niche and approach to it, you may find other kinds of patterns worth thinking about. You might see something immediately that fits into the patterns I’ve mentioned here, or you might need to juggle the data a little bit to see what it’s trying to tell you. “After you’ve established patterns and have identified the questions they spark, it’s time to seek out those in your organization that can answer the questions about visitor intent thoroughly.” With those answers in hand, you can adapt your website to make it better serve your visitors – and improve your bottom line. Good luck!

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Terri

The post Are Your Visitors Lost? appeared first on SEO Chat.

I never thought of YouTube as a keyword resource myself until I read Kieron Hughes on the subject. While many SEOs prefer to work their magic in fields with which they’re intimately familiar (like a dentist-turned-SEO optimizing sites for dentists), that’s not always possible. In that case, the SEO must be prepared to become an instant expert.

Some of us have a lot of practice with that kind of research. A few of us even prefer it that way; it keeps us from getting bored. But we’re still faced with a problem. Most clients know their own fields and subject matter inside and out, and this kind of knowledge brings its own peculiar kind of blindness with it. The expert clients don’t know where they’re coming up short in explaining their fields and jargon, and we “instant experts” don’t yet know quite enough to ask the right questions of them to get the best keywords!

This is where YouTube can help fill in the gap. Like Hughes, I want to emphasize that YouTube shouldn’t be your only keyword research resource. But watching some videos in the field for which you’re doing SEO can help turn up keywords that you won’t find in the Google AdWords Keywords Tool. As Hughes notes, “the results displayed by the Google Keyword Tool might be relevant to what you are looking for, [but] they don’t provide the bigger picture, which is what you should be looking for.”

And what should you be looking for? In part, that depends on your client’s specific field. But in general, you’ll need to get a handle on common phrases used by both clients and consumers, and some sense of how they’re used (the word “sugar” will mean something a bit different if you’re optimizing for a pastry school from what it means if you’re optimizing for a diabetes education website).

You might also want to look at whether your client could offer related services that they simply haven’t mentioned. This will give you keywords in similar areas that will draw in clients who may be interested in other services. For example, I have a neighbor who does personal one-on-one exercise training; she also teaches Zumba classes. Those are clearly related services. But she was also a nurse for 18 years, and has a strong background in nutrition. She could offer some kind of nutritional counseling if she wanted to. While that may be less directly related to the personal training and Zumba classes, it’s a good bet that anyone interested enough in their own fitness to check into exercise might be interested in help with their diet – and vice versa.

That brings us indirectly to the third point you should keep in mind as you do your research. Certain conditions or situations will make someone seek out your client’s product or services. What are they? Find that out and you’re looking at another great trove of keyword options.

Okay, so now that we know what we’re looking for, how do we find it on YouTube? As it turns out, when users upload a video to Google, they’re putting in keywords to help you find it. It’s not ideal, of course, but Google requests that users include explanatory text, a relevant title, and some tags. By the time you’re ready to use YouTube for your keyword research, you should already have a few keywords with which you can start your search. So go over to YouTube, put them in, and get your list of videos.

I’m going to use the idea of a diabetes educational site, and “glucose testing” as my keyword. YouTube recommended a few other terms that might be appropriate as a drop-down while I typed this term in, so already I’m getting more terms. My search turned up 947 results. By watching a couple of videos, I found out the proper terms for the supplies used for blood glucose testing, plus one for a condition caused by diabetes (diabetic retinopathy). There are even videos on how to do blood glucose testing on cats and dogs (admittedly a different area, but it’s good to know it’s there).

But the videos themselves, and their descriptions, aren’t the only possible sources of keywords. You can also read through video comments for greater insight. Hughes uses the example of research for a speech therapist’s website. In the comments for one of the videos he viewed, he found three keywords he would never have known to look for: two were terms for conditions that could lead to the need for a speech therapist, and one referred to a particular type of therapy that a speech therapist might offer. Following up with the Google AdWords Keyword Tool revealed that most of the terms saw thousands of searches every month.

Once you get a good grasp of the bigger picture, you can flesh out the different categories for your client’s website. A bare bones website for a speech therapist, for instance, might sprout separate areas for specific services, conditions leading to the services, and helpful therapeutic tools. “By following an iterative process of looking at YouTube, understanding the opportunities, and analyzing the search volumes, you can begin to form a visual picture of how products and services are related – something that can be then portrayed back to the client for approval of additional ideas,” Hughes explained.

As with any tool you use in SEO, you shouldn’t depend on YouTube to the exclusion of your other keyword research tools and resources. But it’s a great way to get a leg up on becoming an instant expert. Good luck!

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Terri

The post Mining YouTube for Keyword Research appeared first on SEO Chat.

A good business owner believes that it’s worth spending some time on the factors that will contribute the most to the success of the business. These are the kinds of things that you’ll want to spend the time to do right. If you do business chiefly online, finding and using the right keywords falls into this category.

The fact is, if you expect (or hope) to be found via the search engines, or plan to do any online marketing, keywords will play an essential role in your business. As Christine Churchill explains, “Almost all online marketing has its foundation in keywords. The words you buy in pay per click, the terms you target for organic, the phrases you focus on in your own images and videos, all depend on making good keyword choices up front.”

Making the wrong keyword choices can cost your company money. If you’ve been reading the articles I’ve written over the past few weeks on keyword research, you know some of the keyword research mistakes online businesses can make, and how to avoid them. Perhaps the biggest mistake a company can make in the way of keyword research, however, is to not do it at all. The second biggest mistake is to rush it, without giving keyword research the amount of time and resources it deserves. Remember, using the right keywords can be critical to your company’s online success. Indeed, Churchill suggests it is as crucial to online success as laying a proper foundation is to constructing a building.

So what is involved in doing proper keyword research? Well, you can find a lot of tips right here on SEO Chat under our keywords topic. You may need to start by broadening your horizons. Make a list of all the keywords you think visitors might use to find what your business offers. Then ask your friends and family what words they’d use in a search engine if they needed to find a company in your field online. You might be surprised at the terms you’ve left out!

Once you’ve expanded your list, you’ll need to narrow it down. How much you need to narrow it down will depend on your particular offering. Victor Murygin suggests optimizing for perhaps 5-10 keywords if your site is small or you’re selling only one product or service. Large websites that sell more goods and/or services will of necessity target more keywords.

In any case, you shouldn’t narrow it down arbitrarily. At this point in your research, you’ll need to use a keyword research tool. Google’s AdWords tool comes in very handy here. This will tell you how many people are actually searching for particular keywords. Focus on the ones on your list that people are actually using in their searches.

Once you know which keywords searchers are using, you can start integrating them into your site’s content. Murygin recommends  using no more than three to four closely-related keywords on each page. “Using more than 3-4 keywords or over-using keywords can skew rankings and ruin the quality and integrity of content,” he notes.

As a writer myself, I find the quality argument most compelling. You’re creating content for your visitors – and these days, social media plays an increasing role in search engine rankings. If a visitor doesn’t enjoy reading your content, they won’t press the Facebook “like” button for the page or give it a “+1” in Google. And they won’t share the link. Increasingly, poor content will lead to a negative effect on your search engine rankings, which can lead to fewer visitors.

Once you’ve created compelling content with the right keywords, your job isn’t over. You will need to review your site’s keywords and traffic on a regular basis. People start using different terms for the same things over time; if you wish to stay relevant, you need to be prepared to change your use of keywords along with them. Tools such as Google Trends can help with this.

I’ve just given you a quick summary – really a sort of overview – of the steps you need to take to do keyword research properly. I haven’t covered such topics as checking your competition or understanding your keywords’ KEI or a number of other important points. But now that you’ve seen an outline of the process, you have no excuse for shirking this very important task. If you do a good job with keyword research for your site, you’ve taken a big step toward helping your online business succeed. Good luck! 

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Terri

The post Good Keyword Research Takes Time appeared first on SEO Chat.

I will grant that if your website appeals to a nostalgic or retro audience, you might be able to get away with certain turns of phrase. Websites focusing on steampunk, old bands, the 1960s and related topics can use older terms to good effect. Those are specialty sites, however. If your target audience lives in the twenty-first century, however – with all of the appropriate trappings – then you’d better make sure you’re speaking their language.

There are a lot of good reasons to make sure your keywords are up to date. Language changes over time, with new words entering the vocabulary and older ones getting dropped. Search engine users enter keywords based on that language. It’s another variation on a possibly familiar theme: it doesn’t matter if you’re ranking well for particular keywords if no one searches using those words.

If your website caters to early adopters interested in bleeding-edge products, you should know exactly what I’m talking about. I’m going to date myself here, but I can remember a time when neither computers nor phones were portable. Even after phones became portable, they weren’t smart at first. That’s why we had PDAs (personal digital assistants) for a while.

You can still get PDAs, but these days they’re often built right into your smartphone, so there’s no need for an additional device. Even so, many people prefer to use other kinds of mobile devices to meet their away-from-desk computing needs, such as iPads – which is what we got when Apple decided to do tablet computers right. And don’t get me started on the evolution of netbooks! I can trace that all the way back through Apple’s iMac to dumb terminals and Sun’s insistence that “the network is the computer.” The idea is close to 30 years old, and it’s really catching on with consumers, finally – but today it’s called cloud computing.

Here is my point: over time, multiple terms evolved for various devices and concepts, even as the devices and concepts themselves evolved. If you want to attract your target audience, you need to use the keywords they’re using NOW, not terms they used in the past.

So how can you do this? Christine Churchill suggests that you start by scanning forums and blogs. Look for threads where forum members are chatting about products that are similar to yours, and look for new terms. Even if you’ve been in a field for a long time – or maybe especially if you’ve been in a field for a long time – you might be surprised at how quickly changes in vocabulary can sneak up on you.

Churchill also suggests checking out Wordspy.com. This website features occasional posts on new words as they’re coined and used, with appropriate citations, links and sometimes even supporting videos. Here’s the site’s discussion of filter bubbles, for example.  

Another way to tell that the language has evolved is to check your site’s performance. Review your keyword list; if you’re getting fewer visitors for certain keywords, but your site still ranks highly for those words, the problem could be fewer people searching with those terms. Take a good look at your site’s performance data and revise your keywords accordingly. Be prepared to conduct this keyword review regularly, depending on how fast your field moves. Good luck!

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Terri

The post Update Your Keywords appeared first on SEO Chat.