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How Many Keywords?
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By Sydney Adams
[Hits: 27680]
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Here we are, in the midst of some serious keyword research. Wehave gone ahead and created a nice list of keywords we've foundpeople to be typing into search engines. So now what? Do wechoose three to four of them.. five to eight? How many keywordsshould we be targeting? Initial instinct may say either one ofthe above ranges is appropriate, but let's ignore our instinctsfor a minute and give it some more thought.
Before we go any further please bookmark the following toolshttp://www.geekwebtalk.com/tools/keywordresearch/http://www.geekwebtalk.com/tools/extractor/http://www.geekwebtalk.com/tools/keyworddirectory/http://www.geekwebtalk.com/tools/relatedkeyword/
ok now! For this discussion, let's assume our site sells women'sclothing. We have our list and we see that the top 5 searchedfor keywords are:
women's clothing - 9,282 women's clothing shop - 3,885 plus sizewomen's clothing - 638 women's sport clothing - 420 women'sclothing catalog - 322
(Numbers shown are approximate searches per day provided byOverture)
For our purposes, four out of the five keywords listed relatewell to what we are trying to sell. Our clothing is generalwomen's clothing so we can remove plus size women's clothingfrom the list. So, here we have four keywords that are veryrelevant to our sites topic, receive lots of searches andeverything looks just peachy.
So what's the hitch? Well, unless your store name is Macy's,Wal-Mart or some other big name clothing retailer, you've gotmany problems if your strategy is to only target these fourphrases. The biggest one being the amazing amount of competitionyou will be facing to achieve top rankings for these words, butthat's not what we're talking about here. Keyword competition isonly one aspect of selecting good keywords. The aspect we'refocusing on today is very simple in concept but for some reasonmany people/site owners don't get it or choose to neglect it.
First, let's get some perspective here. The five keywords listedabove, after doing some quick math, bring in an approximatetotal of 15,000 searches per day according to Overture's numbers.
9,282 3,885 638 420 + 322 ----- 14,547 total searches per day
That's a lot of potential traffic, IF you rank highly for EACHone of those phrases. I can tell you now that if you spend thenext 2 years tailoring your website for those phrases aloneyou'll be lucky to exist in the top 40 results for all of themwhen the 2 years is up. That's a lot of time and work formediocre results that will bring maybe .01% of those searches toyour site. If we know anything by now about search habits it'sthat users don't like to stray much farther than page one thenthey move on to a new search term. Which just so happens to tiein perfectly with the concept we're about to explain.
Search habits show that a user may initially type "women'sclothing" into a search engine to find what they are lookingfor. Once the search is complete and the results are displayed,they will probably click to a few of the top 5 ranking websitesas well as some of the paid listings. What the user generallyends up realizing after this process, is that the results beingshown are entirely too vague in nature to find exactly what theyare looking for. So what do they do next? They narrow down theirsearch of course. Instead of women's clothing they now type insomething like "women's tank tops".
What's this? They're not searching for women's clothing anymore?Of course they are, but instead of such a broad term as women'sclothing they search for more specific items to get better, morerelevant search results. This process continues until they findexactly what they are looking for (pink women's tank top withsilver sequins) or give up trying. So, with this knowledge inmind, let's move on to the concept at hand.
When it comes to your website, what is it that you are actuallytrying to sell? Is it women's clothing? Yes. But is that all? Ishould hope not. In addition to the overall theme of women'sclothing, you might have women's tank tops, women's jeans,skirts, shirts, accessories and many other individual productsand categories that exist in the realm of women's clothing. Thisis where we get into the 'more keywords' is better idea. Everyproduct, category and more importantly, page in your websiteshould be targeting something different. If you have a categoryfor women's jeans, that page should target women's jeans and twoor three other variations of that search term. If you have aproduct within the women's jeans category name seven jeans Apocket style, that page should be targeting keywords consistentwith seven jeans A pocket style. The goal here is to getspecific with our keywords where appropriate.
Now, you may say, "But when I do my keyword research it showshardly any searches for seven jeans A pocket style, so why wouldI target that keyword?" Well, regardless of what those numberssay one can never know for sure every search queried in thesearch engines.. So be honest with yourself and think, "If Iwanted a pair of these jeans, what would I type in to Google?"Me, personally, I'd search for seven jeans A pocket style or Apocket seven jeans, etc. And chances are my site will rank muchhigher for that more specific/less competitive keyword than itwould for something as competitive as women's clothing.
Now, take this concept and apply it to all of yourcategories/products/pages and, depending on your inventory,you'll begin to see why you should be targeting possiblyhundreds of keywords at a time instead of three or four sitewide.
To give us further reason to apply this method to our website,let's look back to the previous numbers mentioned above. We sawapproximately 15,000 searches a day for the top five women'sclothing searches performed according to Overture. How does atbest, a few searches a day for these very specific terms evencompare? I'll show you.
Using our search term suggestion tool we see approximately 10searches a day performed for seven A pocket jeans, 45 searches aday for earl jeans and similar numbers down the line for all ofour specific products and categories.
In the essence of time, let's say on average our specifickeywords get about 20 searches a day each, and we have a list of120 specific keywords based on our products and categories.
So again, we'll do some quick math. 20 searches per day X 120keywords = 2,400 searches per day
We can see from these numbers that with high rankings for ourspecific keywords we could potentially see 2,400 searches a daycoming to our site. This is by no means 15,000 but the truth is,you can eventually equal that number of total searches byexpanding your keyword base over time and get much more targetedtraffic in the process. I'll take 2,400 targeted visitors to mysite over 15,000 general searches any day. Remember, the userssearching for women's clothing usually end up modifying theirsearch to something more specific anyway. So much of thattraffic generated by a search for women's clothing ends up in aquick visit then a quick click on the back button. Whereas auser typing in seven jeans A pocket style clicks to your siteand sees exactly what they are looking for.. That type oftraffic is much more likely to end up in a sale, which is theultimate goal for all of us.
If we lock down all of our specific products and categories withhigh rankings in the search engines we are ensuring that most ofthe traffic generated by our optimization efforts is highlytargeted to what our site offers.
Women's clothing is a great theme for your site, and should beoptimized for (we will go over how to do this in anotherarticle).. But as far as sales, rankings and overall targetedtraffic is concerned, we need to spread our reach well beyondwomen's clothing to all areas of women's clothing. Make sense?
About The Author___________________________________________________________Sydney Adams, Sydney Adams is expert in web development andsearch engine optimization. www.GeekWebTalk.com
http://www.geekwebtalk.com/tools/keywordresearch/http://www.geekwebtalk.com/tools/extractor/http://www.geekwebtalk.com/tools/keyworddirectory/http://www.geekwebtalk.com/tools/relatedkeyword_____________________________________
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