The searcher is a strange beast. You’d be very surprised by what search terms a person types in to the search engines. It’s usually not what your thinking when promoting your blue widget. More times than not you will find your market is using long tail phrases like “freaky custom blue widget” or “custom blue freaky widget” to find what they are looking for.

To help you understand why and, more importantly,  how to identify keywords your market is using to find businesses like yours here are a couple of great resources that give you  better understand of  how to zero in on what the customer is searching plus 7 research tips that can help you to be quickly found by your target market.

Keyword Research – Connecting With Your Target Audience

Keyword research is a vitally important part of your web site’s marketing, whether you are running pay-per-click (PPC) ads, optimizing your website, or launching an off-page SEO campaign In fact, proper keyword research should be the …

Keyword Research

It’s just I don’t know how to introduce something as incredibly dry and just as equally dull as keyword research. In fact you’re probably going to learn more interesting things by actually watching Anchorman. …

7 Secrets to Successful Keyword Research

The quickest way to gain that insight is by conducting research on possible keywords they use. However, so many of my clients conduct only very basic keyword research and miss many keywords because they don’t really delve into the …

Post from: Denver SEO - Local Search Enthusiast

Keyword Research

Why just today I saw a tweet come across my deck gloating about keyword success for the broad keyword phrase online seo marketing and it only took them 2 months to get to the #9 position. 2 months! Btw- I couldn’t find this website in the first 5 pages.

Lets take a little closer look at some data for this search phrase.

Broad match:

Phrase match:

Key for screen shots:

SEOT – Estimated traffic if in the #1 spot
PBR – The percent of broad-match searches versus phrase match
SEOC – Search engine competition
SEOCT – All in title competition
OCI – Commercial intent

As you can see the search volume is very low for broad match at 118 total searches a day while phrase match is only 7 searches a day.

Looking at the PBR percentage only 6% of the words in the keyword phrase are used in this order. Just for reference I wouldn’t target any keyword phrase with less than 55% PBR.

The competition (SEOC) is over 2 million pages. A lot of noise there.

The SEOCT shows around 537,000 pages use the exact same phrase in  their title. This is actually a pretty high number which usually indicates you would have to do a lot of work to beat out 500,000 other pages using the same keyword phrase.

So at the end of 2 months the webmaster would enjoy a healthy 2 visits a day for the phrase match “online seo marketing”. Not much traffic for all that work they had to do to beat out 2 million competitors.

While it is true that you can hold the top position in search for unique keyword phrases, most of the time these phrases have a very low search volume. Although it is perfectly fine for a webmaster to celebrate keyword victories, from an international search stand point it’s hard to get excited about a keyword phrase that only brings a few visitors a day.

Post from: Denver SEO - Local Search Enthusiast

Useless Keywords