Keyword discovery

The second installment of Stickyseed’s SEO for Beginners Guide, we’ll show you how to find and use the best keywords for your site. Keywords are how people find your site. If you don’t invest time into researching the best keywords for your site, the wrong terms and phrases will hurt you in lost rankings and no one even finding you.

To give you the best ROI on your site, here’s some simple steps to take.

Six Steps to Effective Keyword Research

1. Brainstorming. Think of all the words you think a customer would type into their search box when trying to find you. Come up with any words that describe all the services your site offers but avoid overly generic terms like ’shoes’ or ‘clothes’. Be sure to include alternate spellings, wordings and synonyms too.
2. Survey Your Target Audience. Get in touch with past or present customers and ask them for input. This is an excellent way to expand your list.
3. Take advantage of keyword tools. Now that you have your list, your next step is to determine the activity for each of your proposed keywords. You want to narrow your list to only include highly attainable, sought-after phrases that will bring the most qualified traffic to your site. There are a number of great tools that offer concrete data about a keyword trend. Here’s a few, starting with the freebies:
   • Google Adword Keyword Tool
   • Google Suggest
   • Thesaurus.com
   • Check Traffic Tool
   • Trellian Keyword Discovery Tool
   • SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool
   • Wordtracker
   • Yahoo! Search Marketing
4. Finalize your list. You should have a lot of data now about all your keywords. Put it into a spreadsheet or some other visual that will allow you to easily see each word’s conversion rate, search volume and competition rate (as given to you by the tools mentioned above). These three figures will allow you to calculate how viable that term is for your site and help you narrow down your focus to 10-20 highly successful keywords.
5. Use Your Keyword List. Include three to five related keywords per page. Any more and you run the risk of diluting your page and ruin your rankings. Make sure to naturally work the keywords into your content and avoid over-repetition that may be interpreted as spamming.
   Your on-page content isn’t the only place where you can insert keywords. Keywords should also be used in several other elements on your site:
   • Title Tag
   • Meta Description Tags
   • Meta Keywords Tag
   • Headings
   • Alt text
   • Anchor Text/ Navigational Links
6. Monitor Results and analytics. After a few weeks of giving the bots a chance to pick up your keywords, use your analytics tool to monitor results. Google Analytics is an excellent freebie. It will give you hard data about how your keywords are performing in regards to increasing traffic, activity and conversation rates. Pull out the words that aren’t doing much, and put in new ones as your site grows. This is an ongoing process that needs plenty of weeding and watering.

What to Measure

• Conversion Rate. This is the percentage of users searching with a keyword that convert by clicking on an ad, but a product or complete a transaction. They were converted to another level other than looky-loo.
• Predicted Traffic. This is an estimate of how many users will be searching on a given keyword or phrase.
• Value per Customer. This is the average amount of revenue earned per customer using a keyword or phrase.
• Keyword Competition. This is a rough measurement of the competitive environment and level of difficulty for a given term/phrase.

Next: 10 Questions for Site Optimization

Lesson One: Search Engine 101 and How they Work

Back to SEO for Beginners.