Keyword research helps spread the risk

Know your product

Assess your business to determine whether your products/services are widely known about. If you are operating in a niche, or emerging market, some level of education may be required. If people don’t know the terms of your business in order to search for you, some keyword manipulation has to be done to ensure you can make yourself visible. This may involve targeting closely related or themed keywords – the key will be keeping content relevant for the search engines and web users.

If your products or services can be localised i.e. an additional geographical search criteria is added to the search term in order to show results within the region of the user, it makes sense to add locations to your keywords. Similarly, if your products fluctuate in popularity according to season, the addition of seasonal descriptors is going to be advisable at these times.

Look at the competition

Spend some time assessing the competition. Enter a few search terms and have a nose around your competitor’s sites. Checking the keywords in urls and primary content will give you an idea of what they are optimising for and help you appreciate the level and angle of the competition. Apply learnings from trend analysis and keyword tools to add a clearer picture of what web users are most commonly searching for. Consider this in terms of your offering – are those competing in your arena big brands or small companies, are their websites large, polished and well established and how do you compare? A certain degree of honesty is required in adequately assessing your business. You need to determine whether you have the power at this particular point in time to target keywords that may be monopolised by stronger companies. Knowing your limitations will help you select more realistic keywords.

Assess user error

It sounds very simple but when you are considering your keywords you should remember to consider popular misspellings of words. Keyword tools can help you assess this by showing the volume of searches performed on similar or misspelt words close to your own. It is good practice to optimize for these words as well as your key term.

Measure your success

Importantly, once you have assessed and selected the most appropriate keywords for your site and optimised for them, you should still monitor the above factors. Competition is constantly changing and fads, latest news and seasons will always affect searches. As your site grows and the market changes you will need to tinker with your keywords and keyphrases (known as keyword stemming) and even change them to ensure you stay relevant and effective within your marketplace as time goes on.
Search for free keyword research tools.

Find out more about effectively optimizing your page using your selected keywords in our On-page section.

Core and tail term keywords used in online purchase decision making

At the earliest stages of web search, very broad keywords are used in the search query. These are usually characterised by a theme e.g. travelling. To help focus the search the web user will start to whittle down the return variables by adding category descriptors such as ‘backpacking’ or ‘beach holidays’. As the web user gets more ideas, or if they already know what they were looking for, they will add localisation keywords e.g backpacking, Australia, Ayers Rock, thus defining a region or area.

At this stage they can start to explore the product or brand options. Brand and product searches can be a bit chicken and egg. In this case for example, the web user may know of a brand and search using a brand descriptor e.g. Wanderlust Holidays. They may then go on to compare products, dependent on loyalty to that brand. Or alternatively, they may just search something like ‘1 week backpacking trip, Ayers rock’ using the product as the descriptor that will then dictate the brand through the subsequent search results.

Targeting tail terms

The point here, is that the initial keywords become more specific and much longer keyphrases as the search matures. These descriptive phrases are known as ‘tail terms’. They relate to products or services that exist in the long tail of the business model e.g. they may not be highly searched or regularly puchased products, but targeting a lot of them can result in particularly good baseline ROIs. So, despite the fact that you will drive less traffic to your site by targeting tail terms, you are likely to be more successful on these keyphrases than core keywords in the early stages of your web development because of, 1)the propensity to make a purchase at this search stage and 2) the fact that there is less competition at this end of the tail.

As your credibility with the search engine’s grows you can start optimising for more competitive keywords, but it is always advisable to keep a mix of core and tail terms in your site to ensure your presence is felt throughout the online purchasing process.

Helpful tools

For useful tools that can help you research keyword ideas relative to your business or service, check out the free Keyword Analysis Tools featured in our Free Tools section.