Keyword Research - Finding The Right Search Terms
Every commercial website owner need to attract potential customers to his website and persuade them to get their wallet out and purchase the product or service being offered. For many website owners the search engines are an important source of traffic and whether they are using the paid advertising services, such as pay per click, or the organic, free search results to attract customers the search terms they target are hughely important.
Searchers can broadly be divided into those looking for information and those who are researcing to buy. It is the latter that we need to get to our website and complete with a purchase.
When targetting our search terms we need to take into consideration the following factors.
- Predicted traffic - an estimate of how many searchers will be using the search term in a given period of time. We need to assure ourselves that there are sufficient people using the search term to make our effort to attract them viable. On the other hand high traffic numbers indicate that the competition may be too strong for us requiring too high an investment of either time or money. High traffic numbers are often associated with broad search terms such as “wedding” where it is more difficult to judge the searchers intent.
- Customer Value - how much is your customer worth to you. If you are in a high ticket business, such as real estate or cosmetic dentistry one customer is going to be worth a lot of money. As such, very low traffic but highly specific search terms may still be worth going for.
- Competition - the number of competing websites or web pages. If this is too high it probably means that the cost of getting to the front of the queue is going to be too much and we would be better advised to target less competitive and more specific search terms.
- Commercial intent - are searchers looking to buy or merely looking for information? This can often be judged by the specificity of the search term being used. For example, searchers using brand names or model numbers are much more likely to have commercial intent. Compare “digital camera” and “canon eos 450d prices”.
Once you have analysed each of these factors you can make intelligent decisions on the search terms to target.
Generally, when starting with a new website it is best to target lower competition terms and as your website ages and the number of backlinks grows you can become more ambitious and go for terms with more competing pages.