Keyword strategy: Your site’s foundation
If I told you that keywords are the foundation of your website, would you believe it? Are you familiar with the concept of short-tail keywords and long-tail keywords? And do you know that several free online tools are available to make keyword research easier?
In the first part of the SEO blog (What is SEO and how to get the most out of it? – SEO Beginner Guide Part 01), I introduced you to the concept of keywords. In this part, I’m going to talk about keyword research in detail. First of all, what are keywords? Well, in the world of search engines, you can think of keywords as the currency of search optimization, which also means a currency of this new business environment. They are the foundation on which your website needs to be built. In plain English, they are the words or phrases that internet users use to find what they want.
But why am I stressing so much about the keywords? Because the “search world” runs on it. Search engines use those keywords to store and retrieve the best possible results for you. If you own a website or other content on the internet then your success, i.e. being ranked in the first few pages of search engines, greatly depends on your ability to capture search queries for the right phrases. You need to be able to find high-value, high-volume, and relevant terms for your business to direct search traffic to your content with superior rankings.
And for such superior rankings, keyword strategy matters. You need to optimize your site for search, meaning, your domain name, page titles, menus, and content, everything needs to be as per your keyword strategy. Just like you build a strong foundation before you build a house, you need to build a strong keyword strategy before developing your website.
Short tail and long tail keywords
If you’ve never heard the terms short tail and long tail keywords before, then you don’t need to worry. I’m going to explain it to you. Short tail keywords simply mean keyword phrases with one or two words. And long tail keywords might consist of three or four words or phrases even longer than that. An example of a short-tail keyword would be “Mo:mo: restaurant,” whereas an example of a long-tail keyword would be “Best chicken mo:mo: restaurant in Basantapur.” Indeed, long-tail keywords are mostly searched in lower volumes than their short-tail counterparts. However, long-tail keywords are more important and valuable than short-tail keywords.
If you are wondering why the long tail keyword is valuable, then think about the consumer’s purchase funnel. First, they become aware of a certain product, then they become interested in that product. To know more about the product they do internet searches. And finally, they make purchase decisions after evaluating the available choices. The keywords those consumers use while doing internet searches reflect their intention. In the above-mentioned keyword examples, those who used long tail keywords have shown a clear intent to visit Basantapur and have mo:mo: while the intention of those who used short tail keywords is not quite clear. People searching just “Mo:mo: restaurant” are less likely to purchase mo:mo: than people searching for “Best chicken mo:mo: restaurant in Basantapur”.
You can see in Figure 1 that the short tail keywords lead to higher volume but at the same time, the competition is also high. On the other hand, the long tail keywords enjoy a higher probability of conversion. It is easier to convert the long-tail keyword searchers into customers than to convert the short-tail searchers.
Figure 1: Short tail and long tail keywords
Thus, the deeper you go in search of long tail keywords for your business, the less search competition you’ll face. However, being too specific might also lead to less or no traffic. So you need to be very calculative about the keywords that you fight for.
Some powerful long-tail strategy
To capture the convertible customers, here are some tips to develop long-tail keywords:
- Adding geographic locations of those areas that fall under your service area can also form a great long-tail keyword. For example, if you are an educational consultancy in Kathmandu then you can be more specific as “educational consultancy in Putalisadak”.
- Another good way of creating a long tail keyword can be by adding the manufacturer names. For example, “Samsung mobile and electronics repair”.
- Other qualifiers like “Top-rated” and “Best” can also be added to form effective long-tail searches.
- However, don’t get carried away and create too specific keywords which will not bring you any search traffic.
Online keyword research tools
To develop our keyword strategy we also need help from online tools which collect information and maintain a database of keyword search volume. We can find paid as well as free tools to carry out keyword research. If you can find the high volume keywords and rank for the same then customers will come to your site. These online tools can also provide you with alternative terms or related terms or the terms that people mostly use for searches. This will help you to build your lists of keywords for your website.
There are several popular and effective free keyword research tools that you can use to develop your keyword strategy. We will discuss two of them in this section.
Google Trends
It is a website by Google that uses time series graphs and geographical locations to portray the search behaviors of people all around the world. It analyzes the popularity of a keyword over time. By using this tool, we can analyze during which time of the year the search for certain goods peaks and during which time it drops. You can click on this link to go to that website: https://trends.google.com/trends/?geo=NP
After we enter a term, Google Trends will show four major data – interest over time, interest by subregion, related topics, and related queries. Let’s search “scooter” to explain it in more detail.
Figure 2: Interest for the past 5 years
Figure 2 shows the data of interest over time of the word scooter for the past 5 years, meaning that are people of Nepal mostly searching for scooters. The data shows that the search usually spikes during October or November every year. It is that time of the year when the main festivals Dashain and Tihar fall. It is because most of the brands provide festival discount offers during that period.
Figure 3: Interest for the past 12 months
Figure 3 shows the recent data till April 2020. The search for scooters drastically dropped from March. The major reason can be the country-wide lockdown.
Figure 4: Interest by sub-region
Figure 5: Related topics and related queries
Similarly in Figure 4, you can see that Google Trends also shows the region-wise data, and Figure 5 shows the related search topics and queries. You can see that people also want to know the price of scooters and the most popular brands in Nepal are Bajaj, Yamaha, Vespa, Pleasure, and TVs. If you are a website that provides information about scooters then you know which brands you must include.
Keyword Generator
Keyword generator is a website by Ahrefs that helps you to discover hundreds of keyword ideas in seconds. Here is the link to their website: https://ahrefs.com/keyword-generator. The keyword generator finds up to 150 ideas for any keywords that you enter. As you can see in figure 5, the keyword generator is set to generate keywords for Google and the default country is the United States. You can switch the keyword generator to find keyword ideas for Bing, YouTube, and Amazon; and you can also choose any countries that you wish to rank in.
Figure 6: Keyword generator by ahrefs
Once you enter a keyword, you’ll get keyword ideas along with Keyword Difficulty and monthly keyword volume (see figure 7 for reference). Keyword Difficulty shows how difficult it will be to rank for that particular keyword or key phrase. It is represented by numbers between 0-100 and the higher it is, it means the more backlinks you’ll require to rank. Figure 7 shows that the term “bitcoin” has the highest search volume and the Keyword Difficulty is also the highest. It means if you’ve written some content on bitcoin, you’ll need several backlinks to increase the traffic to your content. The search rate for the word “bitcoin” is high even though bitcoin is illegal in Nepal. You can also get the keyword ideas in the form of questions (see figure 8 for reference).
Figure 7: Keyword ideas generated for bitcoin
Figure 8: Keyword ideas in the form of questions
Identifying and developing keyword lists
Now that you know how to search for keywords, you’ll need to develop your keyword lists. For that you need to go through the following steps:
- Collection: In this first phase, all you need to do is collect as many keywords as you can and make a list. You can narrow down the list later. To build your keyword list, first, you need to think about the goods or services that you offer and think of every possible word and/or combination of words that people might use while searching for what you sell. Another thing that you need to keep in mind is that you need to prepare the list from the viewpoint of customers, meaning you need to find the kind of keywords that your customers will use, not what you would like them to use. For example, if you are a cosmetic surgeon then you might want to use that same word as your keyword. However, people mostly refer to this field as plastic surgery and if they are searching for a doctor related to that field then they might prefer to search “plastic surgeon” rather than “cosmetic surgeon”. Similarly, you also need to consider the synonyms of certain words like “bookkeeper” and “accountant”.
- Analysis: In the analysis phase, you need to give relative weights to all the terms and eliminate all the undesirable terms. For the analysis purpose, you can prepare a table in a spreadsheet with three columns as shown in Table 1.
Table 1: Weighted value for keywords
To find out about the search volumes per month of a particular keyword or keyphrase you can take help from the online tools discussed above. Then you need to assign a relevance score, between zero and 100, to those keywords. The relevance score is a way of representing the value of those keywords or phrases to your business. Higher relevance scores can be given if that particular keyword is highly relevant to your business and if the keyword is less relevant then you can give less score. For example, if you own a hotel in Pokhara then the keyword “hotels in Pokhara” is 100 percent relevant to you. You would like your website to be listed on the result page of a search engine when people search using that keyword. And finally, to calculate the weighted value of the keyword, all you need to do is multiply the monthly searches and relevance % columns. From table 1, you might want to remove the keyphrase “cheap hotels in Pokhara” as the weighted value is very less as compared to others.
- Expansion: The expansion phase will start when campaigns have already been started. You’ll learn what types of keywords are generating traffic from the reports of your campaign and also from the competitors. And then you can keep on updating the lists. New products and product model numbers will become new keywords as they are released to the market. New technologies create new keyword opportunities at an ever-increasing pace. New laws create new keyword opportunities as they are passed. Stay on top of these keyword trends and you’ll further edge out your competitors.
Summary
In this third part of the SEO blog, you learned one very important thing: keywords are the foundation of your website and you need to be serious about preparing a good keyword list. You also learned the difference between long-tail and short-tail searches and the importance of long-tail searches for a higher conversion rate. Then you learned about two of the free online tools that you can use to build your keyword list. You also learned how to search and develop an initial list of keywords and after that use a spreadsheet to eliminate the keywords that are less relevant to your business. Hope you will employ these methods that you learned to make keyword lists for your business.
Courtesy: Trilogy Digital Pathshala – Best SEO Certification Training Course in Nepal