A Nifty Little Keyword Analysis Trick That Most People Don’t Know About
By Christine OKelly | May 12, 2010
If you’ve plunged into the “90 Days to Higher Search Engine Rankings Challenge,” welcome to lesson #3. If you’re new to the series and want to seriously learn the steps I take to get my clients ranking in top positions for profitable keywords, I highly suggest starting at Higher Search Engine Rankings Challenge #1 and digging in!
You may be wondering why for three straight lessons, I’ve been obsessed about keyword research — but it’s because it is that important. I know it’s not as much fun as diving into social media or publishing kick ass content, but I promise… if you want to start building qualified leads and sales through organic search engine traffic, strategically choosing your keywords will be the foundation of your success.
Today’s Mission: Finalizing Your Laser Targeted Keyword “Short List”
Est. time to complete: 40-80 minutes (depending on the number of keywords found)
You may be feeling overwhelmed right now based on the number of keyword opportunities that you found in the last two challenges. You may have found hundreds of keywords that you want to optimize for.
However, not ALL of these keywords are going to be good target keywords. And even if they are, some are going to be more effective than others. This list has got to be prioritized. I’ve found that it’s far more effective to pick 5-10 keyword terms and hit them hard for a few months before moving onto another group, rather than spreading your efforts over 20-30 keywords at once.
Keyword Refinement Step One: Identify the HIGH CONVERSION TERMS
If we’re going to have to narrow down the list, we may as well start with terms that are HIGH CONVERSION TERMS — terms that imply that someone is looking to buy.
If you did the second session of the ‘90 Days to Higher Search Engine Rankings‘ challenge, you downloaded a keyword research worksheet and filled in some of the columns. Now you’re going to complete more of those columns. In the column titled “type” you’re going use your gut instinct and what you know about your industry to designate which of these are actionable (conversion-focused) terms. If it is a high conversion term type “actionable” in Column D. Do this for all keywords.
For example, if you’re a graphic designer, you might imply that someone who searches for “hire a graphic designer” is more likely to buy than someone who searches for “graphic design elements.” Therefore, the term “hire a graphic designer” would be an “actionable” term.
Next, click the arrow buttons on Column D and “sort descending.” All of your actionable items should be grouped together. For now, we’re only going to work with these. You can cut and paste all of the other items onto another tab on your excel sheet — we’ll come back and revisit those at a later date.
Here’s Where The Nifty Little Keyword Research Trick Comes Into Play…
Keyword Refinement Step Two: Analyze the Organic Competition
You’ve seen the “1 – 10 of about” number that appears when you do a search for a keyword term. These are the number of pages that Google believes is relevant to your search query. I don’t believe that this number is important — what matters more in terms of identifying how many pages you are REALLY competition against are the number of pages with the search term in the title tag of the page.
“allintitle:” is a Google Operator. This particular operator returns only the results where your keyword is in the title tag of the website. This allows you to get a good feel for the number of sites that are actively optimizing for a particular keyword — i.e. how steep the competition truly is for that keyword.
Note If you conduct a between 25 and 30 of “allintite:” search results consecutively; you will get a “We’re sorry” screen from Google. Don’t be alarmed. You need to take a break and come back to it later. You haven’t done anything wrong by searching for “allintitle” — in fact, Google tells you how to do this. They only reason the search gets blocked for a while is because, if you’ve done many searches like this consecutively, Google thinks that you are running a script to do automated meta searches — which is NOT allowed.
ACTION ITEMS
- One by one, enter the keyword terms you’ve listed into Google
- This time however, precede the keyword with the term “allintitle: ” (do not include quotation marks and leave a space between allintitle: and your keyword.
- Copy the number of search results and paste that number into column C.
- Graph the results
Analyzing the Keyword Research Data
Now that you’ve got all of this raw data, you need to know how to read it. Looking at a spreadsheet full of numbers can be hard to read at first. I usually work with the raw data, but I know it helps to have something to “look” at that gives a visual snapshot of the data. Adding a graph can help you to quickly get a visual picture of your data.
The ideal keyword is one that has high search volume and low competition. That doesn’t mean that you can’t rank for high volume keywords — it just means that it’s going to take a little bit longer.
ACTION ITEMS
- Highlight the data in columns A, B, and C (including the titles)
- If you have a newer version of Excel, click the “gallery” icon and select the “charts” tab
- Scroll through the chart types until you find the “bubble” graph
- Select the bubble graph – and a graph will instantly appear
Reading the graph:
- The SIZE of the bubble represents the amount of competition. A bigger bubble = greater competition.
- The height of the bubble on the page represents the search volume
- A small bubble high on the page = a term with high search volume and low competition
- By hovering over the bubble, you can read the name of the keyword
Building Your Keyword Short List
Next, you are going to build your shortlist of keywords. These are going to be keywords that you are going to work very closely with over the next 30 days. To keep things simple, I suggest that you choose 6 keywords. For this first month, those 6 keywords will be
- 3 absolute “must haves” in terms of conversion
- 3 of the lowest competition keywords that have a relatively significant amount of searches (I’m not going to give an exact figure, because each industry is different. For some industries “relatively significant” may mean 1000 and for others it may mean 300.)
If you’ve made it this far, congratulations! You have made it through what I consider to be the most tedious part of SEO! Keyword research can be boring, frustrating, and mind numbing, but if you’ve pushed through, you’re in a better position than everyone else who gave up.
Coming up!
Now that you have a finely tuned list of keywords, your upcoming challenges will revolve around ranking for those keywords. It’s time to start planting the seeds and soon reap the fruits of your labor…
This week, I’d like to give a shout out to Edward Lujan of Setster (NOT an affiliate link) for introducing me to a way to cut out the hassle of trying to schedule a call. Thought I try to handle everything through email, there are times when a call is necessary. I have a 5 hour window of time per day when I can take a call — and that time fills up FAST.
It has been such a pain in the @$$ to try and go back and forth with people. If you schedule phone calls, then you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Here’s a pretty common scenario when scheduling a call before Setster…
- First, I go and check Google calendar and write out an email listing the scattered hours that I’m free.
- The client writes back the later that day and say that they are available at “x” time.
- In the time it took them to write back, someone else has already scheduled a call during that slot because I had given 2 other people the same email with my available times.
- Then we start the dance all over again
The process now with Setster
- I give the person a link my Setster calendar (which is linked to my Google Calendar) and they schedule the call themselves during an available time.
This would be a great tool for people who offer paid consulting, because you can embed a widget on your site — and the tool integrates PayPal so that you can charge for consulting. I may use these features in the future, but right now, I’m just THRILLED to have an easy way to schedule a call that doesn’t take so much time and frustration. If you’re looking for appointment scheduling software, I definitely recommend Setster.
Thanks Edward!
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Topics: 90 Days to Higher Search Engine Rankings Challenge by Christine | 19 Comments »
19 Comments »
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Christine,
I am loving this series/challenge. Having just launched a brand new blog, I am really hoping that this and my other SEO efforts can launch it to the top soon! It has that passion factor that you discuss in your other post about getting to the top in terms of Search Engines. Thanks for all your hard work and for leading the way for people like me!
Hi Matt! So glad you’re loving the challenge – and so glad to have found your blog! I love that you are writing from YOUR point of view – it makes the stories interesting and authentic! When I first started this blog, I decided that I would never write about something that I didn’t have first hand experience with. I appreciate that about your blog as well!
Keep us posted on how you’re doing with your goal of rising to the top or the search engines!
This is exactly the kind of tool I’ve been looking for regarding keywords. Seeing it visually like this is extremely helpful.
You rock, Christine.
Thanks Brian! I agree that the visual component helps tremendously. Looking at a big ugly spreadsheet of keywords and numbers doesn’t make it easy to make intuitive decisions. I hope this helps you to find some choice keyword opportunities!
Very nice method. I am a subscriber to SEOMoz and they have a keyword difficulty tool. I need to dig around to find their metrics but I did some analysis using their tool and your approach.
I took about 20 terms and scored them with each method. I then created a relative difficulty score by using the most difficult term as a reference.
The two methods produce very different results. On average, there is a 116% difference between your score and the SEOMoz score.
I’m not saying that any one score is better than the other, just that the methods you use highly impact the words you select.
That is very interesting! The metrics used in this strategy are pretty straightforward – look at the number of pages directly competing for your keyword and see what you’re up against. Of course, keywords are just one factor in the big picture of online marketing, but this method has worked for me when determining how much of a push I need to give to one keyword over another.
One thing I do want to note to anyone – is not to be scared off if a keyword seems ultra ‘difficult.’ Ranking for a ‘difficult’ keyword doesn’t mean that it’s impossible, only that you may need to focus a bit more on it than an ‘easier’ one.
Thanks so much for sharing!
This is a really helpful series. It helps to have a way to “drill down” and narrow the list of keywords – otherwise it feels overwhelming.
You say you want us to choose 6 “actionable” key terms with reasonable volume and low competition. You also say that you’ve found that optimizing for 5-10 key terms and hitting those hard for several months is more effective than trying to optimize for 20+ phrases.
Do you mean take 6 key terms and then optimize your whole site for them? Or something else?
Here’s SEOmoz’s post on the “perfectly” optimized page for those of you who’re interested: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization.
When does Part 4 come out? Thanks for writing this series.
Hi Jeremy – great question!
The part about focusing on “5-10 key terms and hitting those hard for several months is more effective than trying to optimize for 20+ phrases” relates to the offsite optimization that will take place later.
As far as onsite optimization, I definitely believe in doing the onsite optimization with 1-3 keywords per page as soon as possible. Absolutely agree with Rand’s point in the link you provided as a smart way to optimize onsite.
Again, great question – I’m glad you gave me the chance to explain in more detail!
Thanks for clarifying this, Christine. I was also confused about what you meant and glad that someone asked the question.
Also, like Jeremy says – when does part IV come out? I’m ready to rock!
Awesome Newb! I actually have part IV just about ready and it’s all about solid, creative backlink and visibility building. Thanks for lighting a fire under my butt to get it wrapped up!
This is a really helpful series thank you.
Part IV, Part IV, Part IV. I’m ready for those backlinks!
I am sooo close! I’m also publishing a 2000+ word fact-packed Hubpage to accompany part 4 of the blog post. I’m shooting for having that up by tomorrow and the blog post up by Thursday – I love your passion! No doubt you’re going to rock this challenge….
Keyword is very important in site, particularly in every post. However, no matter how important it is, you don’t need to keyword stuff all your articles. Unless you want to piss off Google.
That is SUCH and incredibly important point WBN! Going crazy with keywords to the point where it sounds unnatural is not a good idea. It’s good to use a variety of related terms as well, not just to repeat one particular keyword over and over and over and over again.
Thank you for sharing that very important tip!
At first, it’s quite confusing to actually do your keyword research. There are so many steps and important points that you need to consider in order to achieve the most useful keyword which you can use into your post/site.
I hear ya Adam – it can be quite confusing and mind racking! As this email came in, I was JUST wrapping up a keyword research project that I’ve been developing off and on for the past 5 days. Though it can be tedious, frustrating, and sometimes boring, its so worth it in the end to have taken the time to do it!
Yes you’re right. It is worth it in the end especially if you see a positive result out of your hardwork for doing the research project. Well, all you need is patience!
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