Striking Keyword Gold: how to target keywords by queue
Anyone can choose related keywords to rank for their websites. However, it is the astute webmaster who knows how to find multiple keyword gold mines among the thousands of possibilities available.
One popular approach is called the “long tail.” In this approach, you search for three words + sentences in the hope of having less competition. The main problem with this approach is that there is a second aspect that most people neglect. The second and most important part of the “long tail” approach is that with longer and more specific phrases, you are more likely to directly meet the user’s needs. While that may seem obvious, many people ignore it or misexecute it. That’s because they don’t understand the importance of their customer’s buying cycle in relation to search engines.
The buying cycle:
The first thing to understand before starting keyword research is the “Buy Cycle”. Its main steps are:
Attention > Interest > Desire > and Action.
Finding tons of low competition but high converting keywords is as simple as understanding your customer’s clothing purchase. When they are in the action stage, you want to be there with them.
Let me give you some examples. Let’s say you are a new real estate agent in the crowded but profitable Los Angeles real estate market. You’ve had an active site for almost 6 months, you’ve done a little bit of SEO but you’ve barely gotten any traffic or a single lead from your site. The problem is more than likely the sentences you are chasing. Everyone will be competing on the SERPs for obvious terms like “Los Angeles real estate.” Now, there is nothing wrong with competing for the best phrases, however, this guide tries to empower you to look at the areas that your competition has ignored and that are at the end of the buying cycle. Trust me, there are great opportunities available in every market.
Think like your customer
Imagine yourself as a client using Google to find or sell real estate in Los Angeles. A typical search might look something like this.
Search Term: 1 “Real Estate” (hmm, too broad, what was I thinking?)
Search Term: 2 “Los Angeles Real Estate” (Lots of options, maybe I need a local agent?)
Search Term: 3 “Los Angeles Real Estate Agent” BINGO!!! If you are a real estate agent in Los Angeles, this should be one of your many keyword gold mines.
Now let me show you how the competition for rankings on Google has decreased as the customer becomes more and more refined with their search. I want you to see how ripe the opportunity is when you understand the process your customers go through.
To get a good idea of a phrase’s level of competition, a simple but very important SEO factor is the title tag. By using Google, we can easily see how many sites have the exact search phrase we are using as their website’s title tag. This is a great early indicator of the competition you will be up against.
The command I use in Google is intitle:”real estate” (it returns results with the exact phrase “real estate” in the title tag).
Diminished Competition
intitle:”real estate” More than 59 million pages returned
intitle:”Los Angeles Real Estate” Up to 25,000 pages returned
intitle:”Real Estate Agent in Los Angeles” 57 Results and only 7 Domains listed!!!
This high-converting keyword is waiting to be ranked by you, “our new real estate agent.” If you do the proper SEO work and point some quality links to the page, then you should start to see highly qualified traffic.
Let me give you one more example and then we’ll move on. Let’s say you sell luxury condos right on the beach in Hawaii, which by the way is where I call home (it’s okay to feel sorry for me). Competition for the Hawaii condo market is fierce and any little advantage you can gain is extremely helpful. Again, all you have to do is understand how a potential customer searches and know your own product to find those keyword gems.
Results:
Search 1: “Hawaii Condos” intitle – 11,100 pages
Search 2: Title “Hawaii Condo Rental” – 147 pages (big action phrase)
Search 3: “Hawaii beach front condo” intitle – 0 pages!!!
I could literally go on and on finding great marketing opportunities for these two markets. I promise you that if you put in the time, you will find these keyword treasures all too easy in your market too. Now let’s take what we’ve learned to the next level with action phrases.
Make use of action words
Well, let’s say you sell the latest PC video cards at great prices. You’ve done your homework and realize that many consumers do extensive research on specific video cards to find the one that’s perfect for them. They then search for the specific model of video card they want when in “buy mode”.
A popular video card series at the moment is Nvidia’s Geforce 6800. However, when you do a Google search, you get over 40,000 results for “Nvidia Geforce 6800”. This is where action words come in handy. Some great action words are Buy, Lowest Price, Purchase, Free Shipping, etc. All of these words are used when the customer is in the buying phase, which is exactly when you need them to find you.
intitle:”Buy nvidia geforce 6800″ 3 sites!!!
intitle:”Buy nvidia geforce 6800″ 0 sites!!!
intitle:”Lowest price nvidia geforce 6800″ 0 sites!!!
You get the idea. Now that you understand the concept, I can suggest some keyword research tools.
Now we are going to put you on a path to find 20-40 money keywords that you are not currently using.
Keyword Research Steps:
Step 1 – Logs: A great asset that you may not be using is your weblogs. You should always search your blogs for niche keyword phrases and use them as the basis for the type of queries your users are typing into search engines. If you haven’t done this before, it can be very informative. Not only will you better understand your audience, but you’ll also gain a wide variety of keyword “gold mines” that you can then use for your organic SEO campaign. I suggest doing this once a month or every other week if you can find the time.
Step 2 – Competition: Your competition can be a great source of keyword research. Check the keywords in your title, meta tags, and body text to see if you find anything you missed.
Step 3 – Keyword Tools: Three free tools you should check out are SEO Books’ online keyword tool http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/ and http://www.goodkeywords.com/, which is a free desktop download that works with data from Yahoo and http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/ which queries both Yahoo and http://www.wordtracker.com/ (a superior tool if you’re paying). These three tools are very useful and for the price… who can complain?
A word to the wise, these tools should only be used as guides. They are heavily biased towards PPC (pay per click) advertising and are subject to distortion due to automated queries.
The main thing to note with any tool that Yahoo uses is that it does not separate plurals. Shows Condo and Condos as the same results. So when you’re doing your research, be sure to check out the Word Tracker tool on the digital dot because the MSN version will show you how a phrase works for the singular versus a plural version. While search engines are still figuring out how they handle plural searches, it’s very important that you select the right one. Sometimes you may choose to search for a less used plural or singular version of a keyword because it has less competition.
Bonus 1: Don’t forget about hyphenated or potentially hyphenated words.
If you’re looking for a term like “increase online traffic,” don’t forget the hyphenated versions of the same phrase. According to Word Tracker, “increase online traffic” is searched 186 times a day on MSN alone. The unscripted version has over 1000 pages listed for one title: Google search. While the scripted version only has 21 sites listed.
Bonus 2: Use jargon or internal terminology when and where it makes sense. A great example of that is locally here in Hawaii. The locals call the main island of Hawaii the “Big Island.” A term like “big island real estate” gets typed up a few thousand times a month. But according to Google, only one site has the phrase in its title!
Bonus 3: People often write keyword phrases as one word. So instead of writing “Hawaii Condos”, they will write “hawaiicondos”. Then the engines offer different results for these 2 sentences, and guess what: the kwkw version is usually MUCH less competitive!
I should mention that just because you find great keywords that others aren’t using in their title tags doesn’t mean you can just put a new title and rank. In some cases, that will actually happen, but in most you’ll need to do a good job with your on-page SEO and acquire some relevant links. In either case, you’ll put yourself in a great position to succeed with minimal competition and maximum ROI.
I hope I have helped you think about the endless possibilities of your own local market. By following these steps, you should be able to quickly generate a wonderful new list of keywords for your site to dominate the “Action” phase of the buying cycle. Once you get your site late in the buying cycle and away from the hordes of competition, it’s pretty easy to find the Gold keyword.
