Nzime

Picking the right keywords for your website should not be a random operation involving a hat… or an octopus.
The first thing you need to forget is what you think of the products on your website (if you’re an ecommerce) and put yourself in the shoes of a shopper. Of course you think the stuff you sell is the greatest thing on the web, you shouldn’t be running a website if you don’t believe in your own products. No, what you need to do is think what terms your customers might use to search for these particular products.
Take new client Westley Richard and Co, They sell beautifully crafted guns and rifles. They really are top of their game in their industry. It takes up to 2 years to make one of their guns and boy, is it worth it. I am hoping that Andrew will take us down on a jolly to Birmingham to see how these guns are made because I’m not entirely sure that pictures do these guns the justice they deserve.
So last week I began researching keywords for Westley Richards and sussing out their competition. I was rather surprised by the results and have put together a top secret list of my recommendations.
Anyway, these guns are at the very premium end of the gun range so we’re not necessarily looking to rank for the highest searched terms surrounding the words ‘gun’and ‘rifle’. Remembering that in the UK people must hold a licence to own a gun and these aren’t easy to come by, they aren’t looking to supply the criminal underworld! Our terms have to be very specific and be clear that this is a luxury item.

Don't just choose your keywords from random

If somebody isn’t looking to spend in excess of £30,000 on a beautiful, handmade gun that would make the gods weep at the sight of its loveliness, that visitor is going to bounce and make your stats looks bad. Remember, we are looking to be true to ourselves, not draw in traffic regardless of how irrelevant the site is to what the visitor may have actually been looking for. I have always been of the opinion that SEO is about attracting the right people to your site and being useful to thos people. It is not about attracting any old website through any means possible and trying to flog them something that they never wanted in the first place. Are you listening Acai Berry affiliates?!

Here are my tips for good keyword research:

- Use a good keyword tool like wordtracker. Not only does it tell you how many searches there are for your chosen key terms but these tolls suggest keywords as well.

- If you choose to use Google’s free external keyword tool, take the numbers with a pinch of salt. Even if you do hit page one position one for your term which apparently has 18,000 searches a month, don’t use that figure to make projections traffic. Even if say 45% of people searching for your term click on your site, you may be disappointed when 8,100 people aren’t coming to your site every month through that term. I have found Google’s results to be somewhat optimistic.

- Don’t pick the keyword with the highest number of searches to begin with. I usually go after smaller keywords first as they are easier to rank for and then when a site is ranking well for these terms I move on to the big hitters. This is so I can get traffic in quickly and this then gives me the time I need to put the work in to ranking for the more competative keywords without the site’s traffic suffering in the mean time.

- Never base your research on broad terms unless you are looking for keyword ideas. Broad search looks for your keywords in any order that are in close proximity. So if you search for jelly babies, you’re possibly including searches for the words ‘jelly’ and ‘babies’ that have no relevance to each other. #fail. “phrase” search shows how many people are searching for a term within a phrase, so they may be asking the search engine a question e.g. ‘why do I need jelly babies to function?’ [exact] searches show you roughly how many people looked for results for the term jelly babies on its own. Believe me, the numbers between the broad and exact searches are huge.

Ok, these tips should be enough to be getting on with. My most important tip is just not to get wrapped up in numbers. Your website will never convert if visitors feel they have been deceived into clicking on your link.