Assessing keywords
No matter what business you are in, there are top-level keywords and phrases for every subject. Examples of ‘top-level’ keywords are things like: Computers, Books, Toys, Food, or Health.
A lot of site owners dream of getting a high ranking for the keywords pertaining to their own particular business or subject matter. Concentrating on these top level keywords is the wrong way to set about marketing for the following reasons:
- It is very hard to compete with these top-level keywords. As an example, go to Google and enter ‘Books’. You will see the first page is full of the big names in books. Amazon, W.H Smiths and the like.
- Even if you had the time, money and the will to compete on such vague terms, big organisations allocate a large budget to make sure they come out top. Even if you managed to get anywhere near the first page for such terms you would need to make it your life’s work to stay there.
- Traffic received from vague keywords is only going to yield a very low conversion rate.
Leave competing for top-level keywords to the big players. Your time and money are much better invested in long-tailed keywords targetted specifically at your goods or subject matter. The highest quality visitors are those that are specifically targetted. For example, if you specialise in maintenance manuals for classic cars and you have a page describing or selling a manual for a Mark II Cortina then you should be considering phrases like Mark II Cortina Manual and Ford Cortina Manual. People searching on the web are becoming ever more sophisticated and they know that if they are looking for something then they get the best result by entering precisely what they are looking for into Google, Yahoo! or MSN.
For every page on your site produce a list of phrases that you would envisage an ideal visitor for that page would have entered in a search engine.
You are going to need to do some analysis on your keyphrases so you will probably find it easier to use a spreadsheet package such as Microsoft Excel to record your findings.
Assessing how popular your keyphrases are
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Assessing how competitive your keyphrases are
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