Choosing Effective Keywords
by: Matthew Rankin
Arguably, keyword selection is the single most important stage in the entire optimization process. If you do not choose the correct keyword phrases you will not maximize your ROI on this campaign. I mention ROI and use it as a reminder that keyword selection is not necessarily about looking for the most searched phrases. A profitable optimization is one which produces the greatest return on investment for the time and money that are available to put towards it.
Bigger Is Not Always Better
If you are a web designer in Seattle who has just started your own business, you could make "web design" the targeted keyword phrase for your site as it certainly has the highest number of searches with 707,962 in September 2004 according to the "Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool". If you have thousands of dollars and many months to dedicated just to attaining those rankings it could be done however, would that be the best use of your time? Alternatively you could target "seattle web site design" with 5,070 searches in September. A Google link check shows the number of links for the top three competitors for the Seattle search had 132, 21, and 47 respectively whereas for "web design" the top three had 18,700, 5,420, and 1,310 incoming links each.
With a good site you would get more work than you could handle with 5,070 searches on Overture alone if you were ranking well on the major search engines. This would clearly provide the highest return on investment for the small business owner who most certainly does not have the time and money available to target "web design" and who wouldn't have the manpower to take advantage of the rankings even if they were attained.
This is an extreme example however it clearly illustrates that sometimes the phrase with the highest number of searches is not necessarily the best target for your business.
Phrases That Sell
Another consideration you will want to make when choosing your keyword phrases is whether or not they are "buy phrases". Phrases with a high number of searches that are not "buy phrases" will tend to bring a lot of traffic, however the conversion ratio will be far lower. Should you choose to target "buy phrases" you may not get the same number of visitors however your ratio of visitors to sales will be much higher.
In this example let's assume you are the marketing director for a well-known accounting company. There will be many choices you can make for your targeted keyword phrase. The top searched phrases in September 2004 that were accounting-related are:
"accounting" with 156,095 searches
"accounting software" with 54,621 searches
"accounting job" with 32,015 searches
"accounting services" with 19,260 searches
"accounting firm" with 13,089 searches
Many might go with their gut instinct and attempt to target "accounting". The problem with this phrase (other than the competition for it) is that the people doing that search are not necessarily even looking for an accounting firm. They may be accounting students, small business owners not interested in hiring an accountant but just looking for tax information, etc. "Accounting software" and "accounting job" are irrelevant, which leaves us with "accounting services" and "accounting firm" as the two main options.
From this point an evaluation of competition should be performed and the pros and cons of making each the primary target should be weighed based on the amount of work it will take to attain the phrase vs. how many searches there are for that phrase.
Often promotions that target multiple "buy phrases" will end up far more successful that those targeting phrases based solely on the number of searches due to the increased conversions and generally decreased competition.
Tools To Use
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Choosing Effective Keywords
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About The Author
Matthew Rankin is the webmaster and owner of SearchPronto (www.searchpronto.com), a pay per click search engine
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