Keyword research directly impacts your SEO success
Keyword research is paramount when it comes to the SEO success of your site. Simply put – it’s extremely important to do keyword research to best position your site for keyword phrases search engine users are actually using.
Here’s an example: you run a small online store that sells shoes. You sell different kinds of shoes: dress shoes, running shoes, clown shoes, whatever shoe ‘fits’ your needs. This is your tagline, in fact…
In any case, a sample of the categories of shoes that you currently have on your site are:
- Mens Athletic Shoes
- Womens Athletic Shoes
- Kids Athletic Shoes
Let’s take a look into each one of these categories and explore if there are any opportunities to change the name to grab a bigger slice of the search engine traffic pie.
First, let’s take a look at the Mens Athletic Shoes category:
Not using an apostrophe in this category name means that you could be potentially missing out on 155,500 monthly searches for what you’re offering: athletic shoes for men (which, if you used that as a “category name”, has 3,600 searches per month of average) . The Google SERPs are different for mens athletic shoes and men’s athletic shoes. By using the non-apostrophe phrase, you’re limiting your audience.
The Womens Athletic Shoes category is different than the above example in that both “Womens Athletic Shoes” and “Women’s Athletic Shoes” both get, on average, 90,500 monthly searches. So if we were to change the Mens Athletic Shoes category name to one with an apostrophe (since it has more people searching on that variation), we would probably (for the sake of continuity) change the women’s category to Women’s Athletic Shoes.
What about your Kids Athletic Shoes category? You were previously putting both boy and girl shoes into this one category.
It looks like if you were to split up this one category into a Boys Athletic Shoes one and a Girls Athletic Shoes category, you could increase your potential average monthly search volume exposure by 122%!
The point of this blog post is this: you want to position your website so that it has the greatest visibility for the most amount of keyword searches possible. This could mean adding an apostrophe to your “Mens Athletic Shoes” category or looking into expansion posibilites for others. In any case, why use a keyword phrase that has only a limited amount of searches if you could target a similar one that has more?
Search term research is the first step we take in any SEM engagement. Need help with your search engine marketing? Take a look at our SEM services and don’t hesitate to contact us today!
I tend to never broaden my search very well (and I have two kw research projects on my plate) – good tip before I get going on that!
[...] search engine advertising. This simple, yet small change in any search engine marketing campaign Keyword research directly impacts your SEO success – amplify-interactive.com 01/22/2009 Keyword research is paramount when it comes to the SEO success [...]
Honestly, this thing to adding an apostrophe takes the cake ! I know it’s also all about point of view. Anyway, I don’t see great future in that kind of opinion.
Busby are you kidding me! You don’t see a future in getting clients the most qualified leads possible? I understand you are simply just trying to get links back to your website and your knowledge of organic search is obviously limited but here is a tip from me to you. Before you comment negatively about something you clearly do not understand do some research. Go to the Google keyword tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal), type in mens shoes and men’s shoes then tell me it doesn’t make a difference. Men’s shoes with the apostrophe receives 3x as many impressions.
Yes my knowledge of organic search is probably limited, but believe me I’m surprised to see people is adding an apostrophe in search keywords.
To those that do not believe the apostrophe does not make a difference, we are the perfect example:
delaware workers compensation 247,000
delaware worker’s compensation 577,000
and the correct grammatically
delaware workers’ compensation 247,000 (it appears Google drops the apostrophe in this case)
Hello,
Those things were clear to everyone but how exactly do you perform that “research” Its a very difficult task you know if you don’t have a relative working for Google or Yahoo ! All those tools of keywork traffic are not correct at all. I mean they are totally wrong if you start optimizing your site with less competitive keywords ! so how do you do it ? you still use those tools and hope it helps !
What are the best tools for keyword research? I usually use the google adwords tool and try to complement it with the free wordtracker tool. If both tools show visitors then i use the keyword. It has worked well with one of my sites and worked okay on some others. Adwords inflates its numbers, so its hard to use that alone.
I have seen lots of SEOs who advice that start with less competitive keywords, build some reputation on net, get some links and then try for more competitive keywords. But you are telling totally opposite to it. Your way is right man, but not for small online shoe store. If some big company is starting its website, then it can use most competitive keywords, not small store owners.
Hey Mike,
I agree with what you’re saying. But why not set yourself up for success?
As per the example, start broad… you sell men’s athletic shoes. The average monthly number of searches for that search term is around 246k. Yeah, of course that search term is going to be highly competitive.
But as you optimize your site, you should have supporting content pages. So, you sell men’s athletic shoes… which is the general search term phrase you are optimizing your site around… but deeper level pages target more-specific terms. These terms are going to be less competitive simply because they’re incredibly focused (like “men’s athletic shoes for large feet”, “how to pick the correct men’s athletic shoe”, “red size 11 men’s athletic shoes”", “men’s athletic shoes for tennis”, etc.).
Simply put – you need to set-up your site for success. If you optimize your site around a small segment of search terms that are less competitive and don’t bring in much traffic, hey, you can’t make individuals search for specific phrases.
I’ve been using Market Samurai for Keyword Research, seems to be a good product. Anybody have other, better suggestions?
Paul,
Never even heard of market samurai, but that doesn’t mean anything. Along with the rest of our community, we’re pretty happy to endorse keyworddiscovery & wordtracker along with the google keyword research tool.
I should point out though that we use the tools available in a pretty specific manner and do a lot of our data crunching in good ol’ spreadsheets. So we don’t really use tools to help us determine what to target or anything – just for finding the universe of terms available and relative search volume – that’s about it.