Keyword Research

Keyword Research is a difficult task. Anyone who has tried to drive eyeballs to their website can vouch for this fact. It’s also well known that increasing traffic is not necessarily going to benefit your site, but increasing well-targeted traffic – people who are qualified to be interested in your product or service – will almost certainly benefit the bottom line. With this in mind there is little point in adding content to a site without making sure that you have defined your keywords clearly and are working to include them in your content, internal and external linking, and PPC campaigns. To fail to do this would simply dilute the effectiveness of this type of business development.

 

Local Words – Fresh Traffic

One of the essential components to good keyword development is knowing the local parlance and phrasing that surrounds your topic. For those immersed in their subject matter, it can be difficult to see their subject from different angles, but to develop a great keyword campaign, tapping into markets other than the market that you’re familiar with can be a big help. People in different countries use different word patterning and their languages exhibit specific linguistic nuances. This can present an opportunity to unlock traffic from new parts of the world as your keyword understanding expands. In the same way that much of the fun of traveling can center around experiencing cultural differences, engaging a multi-cultural business model will inevitably illuminate differences. One favorite example of local languages conveying the same meaning with different words include the greeting equivalents, “How you going?” for Australians and, “How you doing?” for Canadians and Americans. Another example can be seen in the the grand ‘biscuits‘ vs ‘cookies‘ confusion. This suggests that to pick one or the other is to err; incorporating multiple voices into your keyword strategy will allow your campaign to include potential clients from other locations.

Online marketers know that this difference in language can mean the difference between catching the eye of your target market and missing it. People often search the internet using spoken English, so understanding the way that a product is spoken about across a broad spectrum will allow for a larger and still well-targeted sales campaign. Finding how keywords are used in common vernacular in other regions or languages is difficult, but it is possible to get help.

 

Listening for Keywords

To help us develop more sophisticated methods for creating keyword lists, Gab Goldenberg of SEO ROI Services, spoke to the SMX Advanced Conference in Seattle about embracing some new techniques. One main thrust of his presentation was the idea that listening can be used as a form of keyword discovery. Rather than simply letting Google/Wordtracker/Fill-in-your-keyword-discovery-tool-here recommend keywords based on your understanding of a topic, he recommended visiting places that people gather to talk about your subject – forums, blogs and Twitter – to “put an ear to the ground” and learn the language of people in your subject. Sifting through these conversations, you can learn the words people are using to describe the products and services that you provide from their own mouths and start to build keyword phrases that highlight the local vernacular of people already active in the subject area. This technique expands beyond just gaining a better understanding for the search terms in a field that you’re not familiar with. A great first step to building a keyword list to focus on in a new niche is to find out what the experts and influencers are calling your products and services. Find the experts and influential publishers in your niche and consider their publications as fertile ground for finding relevant keywords for topics in your niche. This will give you access to a nicely refined set of keyword phrases to focus on. As Gab made clear, with highly targeted keyword phrases, the competition decreases, and whether you’re doing PPC or organic search marketing, less competition is good.

With over a billion people on the Internet there’s a whole lot of searching going on. Sometimes it’s easy to think that we’re all searching for the same things using the same words. We’re not. We’ve all got our own brands of English and our own ways of describing things that might be unique to us, our town, our country, our group of friends. It’s both mind boggling and exciting.

Wow, SMX Advanced has been awesome so far. Great speakers and great information. The schedule is set up so that there are back-to-back presentations more or less through the whole day. I can only say that it is going to take a few weeks to digest all this information.

So what are the takeaways for webmasters, after listening to Matt Cutts‘ talk? One message that came through pretty clearly: after you’ve got the basics of good site concept and its architecture down, having some really fantastic content, videos or tools on your site should be the next focus. While there are still some search engine ranking gains to be had by applying yourself to the technical side of the optimizing your site, the message indicates that every webmaster needs to start looking long and hard at creating fantastic stuff for their site that users will find valuable and interesting.

To recap: having the technical side of things in order is certainly important, but if you want to realize high search engine rankings, it is essential to spend the time, effort and money to publish information on your site that is timely and helpful for the user.

Another take-away for the day came out of the Search Ranking Factors for 2009 talk, during which Rand Fishkin spent time unpacking the idea that search engines like to include freshly published content in their search engine rankings. Lots of times people are searching for news about a particular subject, and consequently the search engines will rank newly published information highly in order to satisfy the searchers’ (possible) need for recently published articles. This brings home the fact that there is a need to keep adding content to your site, and it shows that opportunities are available for sites that are regularly adding new content.

Lot’s of other great info is coming that I’m looking forward to sharing!

I’m making the trip to SMX Advanced in Seattle. This is a great opportunity to introduce Constant-Content to some of the movers and shakers in the search marketing world! SMX Advanced looks like it will be a great conference with many of the in-house and agency SEO’s attending so it will be great to introduce them to the site and get their feedback. I’m looking forward to seeing how we can tailor the way that we market our articles to these companies.

If you’re interested in following the events in Seattle, check out the #smx tag on twitter!

If you’re coming to SMX Advanced and are interested in getting together to talk about content, organizing content projects or anything else for that matter, you can get in touch via http://twitter.com/constantcontent or through the support@constant-content.com email address and we can arrange a time to get together! I would love to meet as many people who use the site as possible and get feedback about your experiences with purchasing content through us.