Keyword Research

Wordtracker Masterclass:

Keyword Research

How to deliver visits, response and profits to your website

Mark Nunney

Contents Introduction

9

Part One: Principles & tools of keyword research

11

Introduction: Principles & tools of Keyword Research Chapter 1: The wonder of keyword research

14

Search engines, searches and business

14

Keyword research uses real searches

15

Is this the best, quickest and cheapest market research business can get?

16

Keyword research for SEO

17

Chapter 2: What traditional keyword research is not (and how to fix that) Keyword research is just research

18 18

1. Verify keyword popularity and response rates with PPC

19

2. Invest in SEO for keywords you know you can beat the competition for

19

Chapter 3: Keyword research for profit in the real world Build on success

21 22

Chase maximum ROI

22

Work at scale

23

Your SEO will be transformed

23

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Wordtracker Masterclass: Keyword Research | 2

Prepared exclusively for Viriyah Wongsuparb

Chapter 4: The long tail of keyword research Single keywords are for losers

24

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The insignificant top 10

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The long tail is very long

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Another thing about head keywords

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How to make a profit in the long tail

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Chapter 5: A keyword niche is…

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A keyword niche is like Broad match in AdWords

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Keyword niches have long tails

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Wordtracker Strategizer will help you work with keyword niches

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Chapter 6: Response response response Ecommerce response

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Goals

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Chapter 7: Simplify SEO by building on success How to find your target keywords

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1) Ranking higher on Google (for the same keywords)

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2) Target down the long tail

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3) Target up the long tail

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Write it and they will come

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Why it works

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Dig deep and you will find gold

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How to manually convert your Google Analytics keyword reports into keyword niche reports

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Wordtracker Strategizer automates your keyword research

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Chapter 8: The importance of context What are you selling?

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Who are you selling to?

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Keyword research must serve company, marketing & sales strategy (and tactics)

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Finding the keywords your targets are searching with

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Chapter 9: The keyword research process

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Keyword Research Funnel

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Keyword Research Circle of Response

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Part Two: Keyword research for new sites

58

Introduction: The Keyword Research Funnel Find, prioritize & verify target keywords 1) Find target markets

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2) Prioritize target keyword niches

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3) Create first content

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4) PPC to verify target keywords’ response

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5) SEO for verified keywords

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Keyword Research Funnel Step 1. Find target markets

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Chapter 10: Find target markets

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Keyword research starts with seed keywords

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What are you selling again?

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What do you and your employees think?

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Listen to your customers

65

Read the best and most popular relevant websites

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Create a new Project and a Potential Target Markets List in Wordtracker

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Use Wordtracker Keywords Tool’s Related Keywords Tool

68

Choose your target markets

71

Next

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Chapter 11: Planning your site structure with keyword research Using mind maps to help plan your site’s structure

77

Keyword Research Funnel Step 2. Prioritize target keyword niches

Chapter 12: Prioritize keywords within each category Start with your top target market

74 80

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a) Search Wordtracker’s database with the target market seed keyword

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b) Assess the most Popular keywords

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c) Assess the most Competitive keywords

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d) Assess Popularity/Competition ratios part 1 (KEI)

93

e) Assess Popularity/Competition ratios part 2 (KEI3)

94

f) Review Target Keywords List

95

If the competition for a keyword looks too tough

95

Yet more prioritizing

96

Verify with Google data

97

Find all your target markets’ target keywords

97

Keyword Research Funnel Step 3. Create first content

98

Chapter 13: Plan your website What does the home page target?

99

101

And the category home pages?

101

Next

101

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Chapter 14: Build your site cautiously We’ve only just begun

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Keyword Research Funnel Step 4. PPC to verify target keywords

Chapter 15: Verify keyword targets with PPC

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Keyword Research Funnel Step 5. SEO for verified keywords

108

Chapter 16: SEO for target keywords verified by PPC

109

Optimize individual pages for their target keyword niches

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Optimize the home page so it supports the keyword niches the rest of the site targets

110

Start some link building

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Now wait

112

Keyword Research Funnel

113

With consistent organic traffic move to the Keyword Research Circle of Response

Part Three: Keyword research for sites with traffic

114

Introduction: The Keyword Research Circle of Response

115

Exploit your proven most-profitable keyword niches A) Find new priority target keyword niches

116

B) Find new keyword niches within target niches

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C) Invest in new target keyword niches

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D) For max ROI use marginal response and profit

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Keyword Research Circle of Response A. Find new priority target keyword niches

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Chapter 17: Find new target keyword niches

118

Some long-term keyword and SEO strategy

126

Keyword Research Circle of Response B. Find new keyword niches within target niches

128

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Chapter 18: Find keyword niches within target niches Keyword Research Circle of Response C. Invest in new target keyword niches

129

Chapter 19: Invest in your new target keyword niches SEO

134

135 135

PPC

136

Build a bid stack (Exact, Phrase and Broad match bids on the same keywords)

138

Finding Negative keywords with Strategizer

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Negative keywords from Analytics, AdWords and the Wordtracker Keywords tool

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Keyword Research Circle of Response D. For max ROI use marginal response & profit

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Chapter 20: Maximize return on investment (ROI) Monitor Trends in site visits and response

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See Google Insights’ graphs of seasonal trends and regional variations

142

Monitor Opportunity

143

See Site Visits, Response, Google Insights and Opportunities in one view

143

Monitor marginal response rates

143

Cross reference with Google Insights

145

Long-term investment can’t change with the wind

145

Short-term investment can change with the wind

145

Response is not profit

146

Keyword research and SEO never stops

146

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Also published by Wordtracker:

Link Building How to build links to your website for SEO, traffic and response. Click here to learn more.

Blogging for Business 50 Steps to Building Traffic and Sales A real world guide to creating, writing and promoting a successful blog. Click here to learn more. Wordtracker.com

Google AdWords PPC Advertising

The Web Content Recipe Book

A Practical step-by-step guide for creating profitable PPC campaigns. Click here to learn more.

Learn the ‘Secret Recipe’ for outstanding website content. Click here to learn more.

50 Kick-Ass Keyword Strategies

Writing Kick-Ass Website Sales Copy

Learn 50 simple, smart and speedy ways to attract more customers online. Click here to learn more.

Copywriting guru Nick Usborne reveals his secrets for writing sales-exploding website copy. Click here to learn more.



Introduction This book will give you a practical keyword research process you can use to make your search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) advertising profitable. It’s based on 10 years of front line experience as a professional SEO delivering visits, response and profits in a wide range of markets including luxury hotels, debt help, sports, gifts, banking and gardening. The process described is driven by efficiency, a quest for the bottom line of profit and maximizing the return you’ll get on your efforts. It’s easy to spend lots of time in keyword research pursuing numerous interesting metrics. Complicated spreadsheets full of columns of fascinating data can be built. But if they don’t take you closer to proven response and profit then they are a waste of your time and they are not in this book. The book is in three parts …

Part One Principles and tools of keyword research explores and explains the principles on which the book’s process relies. We’ll look at the the long tail of keywords – the almost limitless number of different keywords used on search engines. You’ll learn how to profit from the long tail by researching, analyzing and optimizing at scale with a shift in perspective from single keywords to groups of keywords (called keyword niches).

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Introduction |

We’ll also look at the different ways we can stay focused on the 3 Rs of search marketing: Response, Response and Response. We’ll then focus on a simple but neglected method of finding and building on success.

Part Two Keyword research for new sites takes us through the five steps of the Keyword Research Funnel. You’ll learn how to find, prioritize and verify target keyword niches for new websites.

Part Three Keyword research for established sites explains the Keyword Research Circle of Response. This is a virtuous circular process of analysis and action that’s based on the principle of exploiting the keyword niches proven to be the most profitable on your site. This book’s process will use the information and tools available from Wordtracker and Google. Google is the world’s leading search engine and makes much valuable information available to help search marketers. Wordtracker’s tools allow you to analyze and organize Google’s (and others’) data in ways not manually possible. The result is a process that begins as a craft using some basic principles of business and ends as a science that will lead you to maximum response and profit from search engine traffic. See you at the top.

Mark Nunney http://twitter.com/marknunney

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Part One

Principles & tools of keyword research


Introduction Before we get into the specifics of our practical keyword research process there are a number of concepts, ideas and principles that should be understood. We’ll explore these in this first part of the book. Traditional keyword research uses samples of real searches (keywords) to make estimates of the Popularity of those keywords. It might then look at the websites competing for each keyword; and make estimates about how hard it is for any site to beat that Competition and get results. Popularity and Competition metrics can then be combined to choose keywords with a good risk (competition) v reward (popularity) ratio. That’s a good start and we’ll use this traditional approach in Part Two. But it should only be the start of your keyword research process. Soon your site will have traffic and real data that shows you which keywords your sites can beat the competition for and get response from. We’ll show you how to do that in Part Three. This book is more interested in maximizing your profit than just finding some keywords to target. So we will look at how keyword research can be used for SEO for profit in the real world. Such a journey leads inevitably to the long tail of keywords. This is the almost infinite variety of keywords used on search engines. So varied that 20% of the keywords used each day are either completely new or have not been used for at least six months. This means that for any single (or exact) keyword you target (let’s call this the ‘head’), there are likely thousands of variations that you also want to get results for (this is the long tail). Indeed, the long tail is so big that the head is insignificant.

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Part One: Introduction | Principles & tools of keyword research

So if you’re selling herbal tea, you don’t just target the keyword herbal tea; you target all keywords containing herbal tea and there will be many thousands of them. That group of keywords is called the herbal tea keyword niche. We’ll see how targeting keyword niches is key to making a profit from search engines. And we’ll give you a simple process for doing so. At the end of this part of the book, we will look at the context in which keyword research takes place. Keyword research and search marketing must serve your company’s strategies and tactics. That context nicely sets up an outline of the major steps and stages to the keyword research process before Parts Two and Three of the book explain them in detail.

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Chapter 1: The wonder of keyword research Search engines help people find information and buy things. A young man wanting to buy some fancy chocolates for his beloved might go to Google and make a search with the phrase gourmet chocolates.

The single search phrase – gourmet chocolates – is called the search query or keyword. If you are selling gourmet chocolates then you want your website to be on the first page of results that Google returns for a search with that keyword, preferably at the top. Keyword research is interested in finding which keywords your target customers are using and your business can make the most profit from. You then optimize your website so it can be found on Google, Bing and Yahoo when those searches are made. Search engine optimization (SEO) begins with keyword research.

Search engines, searches and business A staggering 100 billion searches were made each month in 2009 (source: comScore). The different combinations of words used are almost endless, with 20% of keywords used each day being either unique or not used for six months (source: Google). Unsurprisingly, online sales and influence are now significant for most businesses. Something like $160 billion was spent online in 2009 (source: eMarketer). The influence of online research on offline sales is even greater as 89% of consumers

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Part One: Chapter 1 | The wonder of keyword research

research online before making offline purchases (source: comScore). So even those who don’t buy online, decide online. See image:

Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter are increasingly important but search engines still dominate the commercial landscape online (including mobile phones which also have search engines). And smart search marketers use social media to improve their search engine optimization. With all that money to be made and influence to be had from search engine results pages (SERPs), keyword research is a serious business.

Keyword research uses real searches Keyword research tools use databases of the keywords used for real searches, from which you gauge the popularity of those keywords, ie, how often they are searched with. For example, Wordtracker might give a searches figure for gourmet chocolate of 173

That means Wordtracker’s database of 540,689,554 (at time of writing) real searches contains 173 searches with the exact keyword gourmet chocolate. Wordtracker.com




To estimate how often gourmet chocolate is searched with (how popular it is) you have to either: • Extrapolate from that sample number of searches with a crude formula like 173 x 200 to get a monthly estimate. ‘200’ because 500 million (the approximate size of Wordtracker’s database) is 0.5% of 100 billion (the approximate number of searches made each month on all search engines). • Judge the relative popularity of gourmet chocolate as a keyword by comparing 173 with the searches figure for other keywords in Wordtracker’s database. • Follow the keyword research process I’ll give you in this book and not worry about the specific numbers given by keyword research tools. I recommend the last option above ;-) Google’s keyword research tool doesn’t use all the searches made on Google. It too uses a sample of real searches but it hides its sample figures and goes straight to an estimate of actual searches. For example, for gourmet chocolate Google estimates 12,100 searches were made in one month in the US.

Whatever you do, don’t worry about the specific figures. The figures are just estimates to guide you. This book will show you how to use them.

Is this the best, quickest and cheapest market research business can get? Keyword research tools might just be the best, quickest and cheapest market research that a business can get. The keywords in these databases are real searches and that will include searches made by your target customers.

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The wonder of keyword research is that it gives you direct contact with the behavior of thousands, perhaps millions of potential customers.

Keyword research for SEO Keyword research can help with many things, including: researching new products and businesses; finding ideas for news stories; pay per click (PPC) advertising on search engines and optimizing your website for organic (non-paid) search engine traffic (SEO). This book is primarily about keyword research for SEO and a little bit of PPC. If you have any questions about this book, or any related matters you’d like to discuss, drop by this page on the Wordtracker Academy. You can also join us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Also, you can take a 7-day free trial of Wordtracker Keywords Tool here and $1 onemonth trial of Wordtracker Strategizer here.

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Chapter 2: What traditional keyword research is not (and how to fix that)

Although keyword research is a wonderful thing it’s not perfect. Here we’ll look at the limits of traditional keyword research and how in this book we’ll go beyond those limits, making keyword research more scientific.

Keyword research is just research With keyword research we first explore keywords’ Popularity and Competition. Let’s look at each of those:

• Popularity is how often a keyword is searched with.

• Competition is other websites competing for a keyword and how tough it is to beat them.

With traditional keyword research you can make sure your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts target keywords that have sufficient popularity and offer you the chance of beating the competition. That’s great but it has its limitations, including: • Keyword research tools are subject to error so you must verify their data before significantly investing in their results. • Keyword research tools’ data is from samples of real searches that are at best representative of all searchers (an average of all searchers) in the country the data comes from. Is it the country you are targeting? Are you targeting the whole country or a small part of it? Are you targeting a niche market that can’t be represented by a sample of all searchers? • The competition data might be powerful but it’s not telling you how your site compares to the competition. It is not a relative judgement. Competition might be plenty and tough but you might be tougher (in your market). • You don’t know how well your site will perform against the competition and therefore how hard it will be to get non-paid-for (organic) visits from those searching with a keyword. • If you get the visitors, can your site convert them into sales or some other wanted response? In this book we deal with these limitations in the following two ways ...

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Part One: Chapter 2 | What traditional keyword research is not (and how to fix that)

1. Verify keyword popularity and response rates with PPC With pay per click (PPC) advertising you can verify a keyword’s popularity (how often it is really searched with) and how well your site can convert visitors who have searched with it. Let’s go back to our example of targeting the keyword gourmet chocolates. Keyword research suggests there are at least a few thousand searches made each month with gourmet chocolates and that the competition looks beatable. With Google AdWords (PPC advertising) you can bid for the keyword gourmet chocolates and have an advert for your site appear on Google’s results pages when searches are made with gourmet chocolates. Your Google AdWords account will tell you how many times your ad appeared when gourmet chocolates was searched with. From this you will get a good idea about the keyword’s true popularity. Of course, you don’t care about visits if they don’t convert to sales. And if your ad interests searchers enough for them to click on it and visit your site then you will also find out if you can convert them to sales (or whatever response you hope to achieve).

2. Invest in SEO for keywords you know you can beat the competition for PPC can verify a keyword’s Popularity and the ability of your site to convert those searching with it. But it can’t tell you if you can beat the competition for organic results from search engines. And for our gourmet chocolates example, the competition is 1,370,000 other website pages. See image:

You can only guess how hard it is to beat the competition. That is until you have actually done so.

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Part One: Chapter 2 | What traditional keyword research is not (and how to fix that)

If your site gets just a small amount of organic search engine traffic from a keyword then you know you can beat the competition. You can build on any small successes by targeting those keywords with more SEO. So with SEO you first target a range of keywords that PPC has proven to be responsive. And you wait for results, investing in those keywords that deliver. You’ll have moved from targeting keywords that might bring results to keywords you have proven you can beat the competition for and get response from. You’ll have moved from a craft that provides intelligent guesswork to a scientific method based on proven success. We’ll explore these ideas more in the next chapter and this book gives you a detailed, practical process that uses them. You can follow the process when working on your sites and the result should be substantial visits, response and profit. If you have any questions about this book, or any related matters you’d like to discuss, drop by this page on the Wordtracker Academy. You can also join us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Also, you can take a 7-day free trial of Wordtracker Keywords Tool here and $1 onemonth trial of Wordtracker Strategizer here.

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Chapter 3: Keyword research for profit in the real world

There’s been a lot of theory so far. Much traditional keyword research is theory. The relationship between the results of a traditional keyword research tool and the results on your site are usually assumed. Hoped for. Theory. In theory, if you target a relevant keyword with lots of searches and little competition then you’ll get visitors and make money. For example … You sell chocolates … … you target the keyword gourmet chocolate truffles … … you’ll beat the competition, get visits and make sales. In theory. In this book we’ll connect that theory with the actions required to make a profit in the real world of online business. You will have a detailed process you can follow. Our process uses the following combination of business basics and neglected truths of SEO:

• Build on success - The easiest way to get more organic (non-paid for) traffic from search engines is to target keywords that already bring you traffic. • Chase maximum ROI (return on investment) - The easiest way to make more profit from organic search engine traffic is to target the keyword niches that currently deliver the best response and profit. • Work at scale - The pursuit of maximum profit requires you to work at scale and this needs a shift in analysis from single keywords to groups of keywords (keyword niches).

We’ll explore these principles in more detail further into the book but it’s important we understand them as soon as possible. So they are worth a little more time here …

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Part One: Chapter 3 | Keyword research for profit in the real world

Build on success You might have a website that gets results for the keyword corporate culture. If you target that same keyword you can get more results in these three ways:

1. Ranking higher in Google for corporate culture.

2. Getting results from other keywords containing corporate culture.

3. Getting results from other keywords containing corporate or culture.

We can compare this to a shoe shop that finds a particular brand, model or type of shoe starts to sell. With more effort it should sell more shoes. Or we might just say: fish where the fish are. Yes, it’s that simple.

Chase maximum ROI Your website might get results for more keywords than just corporate culture. For example it might results for these keywords too:

business strategy management theory management style business development

corporate strategy management skills change management

… and many more. You can’t work on targeting all those keywords at once. You’re most interested in the keywords that bring the most response, sales and profit. So you sort your list of target keywords by your chosen measure of response and first target the one at the top. Keep monitoring response rates – they might drop or increase for other keywords – and chase maximum return on investment (ROI). Going back to the shoe shop analogy, this is like promoting not just brands, models and types of shoes that are selling but particularly those that are selling and making the most profit. Any business worthy of the name will promote products that bring the most profit. Again, this is simple and obvious.

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Part One: Chapter 3 | Keyword research for profit in the real world

Work at scale Achieving maximum response requires you to work at an appropriate scale. If SEO targets keywords then those keywords must bring significant visitors and conversions. And few keywords do. It’s a numbers thing … Perhaps you sell donuts and the keyword chocolate donuts is searched with 10,000 times a month. (I’m making these numbers up, by the way.) Get your site to third on search engine results pages (SERPs) and 8% of those chocolate donuts searches might come to your site. That’s 800 visits. Convert 4% of that traffic and you’ve made 32 sales. Enough donuts? The answer is to target all searches containing chocolate donuts, ie, the chocolate donuts keyword niche. There will be hundreds (thousands) of different searches made with keywords containing chocolate donuts – enough to give you the scale required to maximize profit.

Your SEO will be transformed Using these principles, this book can transform your keyword research and SEO from an intriguing theory to a profit-making process for your website. If any of this isn’t fully clear yet, don’t worry as we’ll be going into these concepts with more detail and examples. We’ll also show you how to use some tools that do much of the work for you.

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Chapter 4: The long tail of keyword research In one month, a small website about management and leadership received 95,036 visits from search engines via 44,655 different keywords. That’s a lot of keywords for a little site; and it’s a glimpse into the long tail of keyword research. Most websites will need to target the long tail if they want to make a profit. And all websites will need to target the long tail if they want to maximize profits. Here’s a grab of the report showing those figures from our example site:

Here’s another from a busier site on which we see 379,243 keyword (search engine) visits from 210,441 different keywords.

Single keywords are for losers It is clearly impossible to specifically target 44,000 different single keywords. Or as I like to put it more rhetorically:

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Single keywords are for losers



Part One: Chapter 4 | The long tail of keyword research

And yet SEO advice and professional services are almost all about single keywords. Clearly we must choose our SEO help wisely and make our return on investment calculations carefully.

The insignificant top 10 When looking at a site’s stats, we often look at the top 10 keywords. For example, for our management and leadership site we see the following top 10 keywords:

Those top 10 keywords (I’ll call these the site’s ‘head’ keywords) bring 9,400 visits between them, which is less than 10% of the site’s keyword (ie, search engine) traffic. If we have a look into our example site’s long tail – the other 44,645 keywords – we find that only the top 900 bring more than 10 visits a month. No company has the time to even look at all these long tail keywords. And if time was spent targeting any of them, how much response would there be from 10 visits? How much money would be made? Not enough to make it worth anybody’s while. Let’s go deeper still...

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Only 8,135 out of the 44,645 keywords (less than 20%) bring more than one visit a month. That means over 80% bring just one visit. And those single-visit keywords make up approximately 40% of the site’s total keyword (search engine) traffic. Targeting single keywords is starting to look silly. We have a dilemma. Just targeting the head terms leaves the big money on the table but it is clearly not profitable to target single keywords in the long tail. The answer is simple:

Target groups of keywords

Which as it happens is quite easy. But before we look at how to do it, let’s look beyond our little example website ...

The long tail is very long Bill Tancer in his now seminal post, Sizing Up the Long Tail of Search, looked at 14 million searches and concluded that the long tail is so long that the head is of no significance. As Bill puts it: “If search were represented by a tiny lizard with a one-inch head, the tail of that lizard would stretch for 221 miles.” Here’s Bill’s graph of the top 10,000 search terms from his sample (the y-axis shows the % of all searches for each keyword on the x-axis):

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At first glance the above graph might not look like much. But look again. We can see the top 15 keywords – this is the head – and they take up a miniscule % of all searches in the sample. By the third most popular keyword, we can’t see its share of searches on the graph. Then there is what we can’t see. The graph continues for a long, long way – for miles. Some figures illustrate this further. In Bill’s sample, the:

• top 100 terms bring 5.7% of searches

• top 500 terms bring 8.9% of searches

• top 1,000 terms bring 10.6% of searches

• top 10,000 terms bring 18.5% of searches

But the long tail is even longer than this. Bill Tancer’s figures amaze but they greatly underestimate the size of the long tail because he used just 14 million searches and, in July 2009 alone, 113 billion searches were made on search engines. So Bill’s sample was about 0.01% of the number of searches made in a month. I can’t do better than quote Bill again: “There’s so much traffic in the tail it is hard to even comprehend.”

Another thing about head keywords Head keywords remain irresistible to many SEOs and website owners. They want to see their site top of Google’s results pages for them. They become trophy keywords. Plus, few people want to go through the learning curve required to start thinking about groups of keywords (keyword niches). But as well as ignoring most searches, head keywords are very competitive. Increasingly, despite Google’s fight against paid links, to get top of Google for the big money keywords you need to pay for your site’s inbound link power. But we don’t want to buy links ... So let’s learn how to play with the long tail ...

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How to make a profit in the long tail How do you make a profit from keywords that bring just one visit a month? Easy: you target lots of them at once – you target groups of keywords (keyword niches). Here’s how ... Let’s start simply with one page. Your SEO might focus on one or two keywords but you’re really targeting those keywords and their long tails. And the more relevant and related words on your page, the more of that tail you can get results for. This is why I love 2,000 word articles. Let’s look at an example ... The following image is from a Google Analytics report for a page from thinkingmanagers.com about swot analysis and strengths and weaknesses. We can see it gets results for up to 10,000 different keywords.

This long tail tactic is so effective that you can get great results from a page without getting anything from its primary target keywords. Eg, the page mentioned above doesn’t get a top 10 ranking for either swot analysis or strengths and weaknesses. We can summarize this tactic with a mantra ...

target the head, exploit the tail

This does not mean that you should spend hours stuffing (or just adding) relevant keywords to your pages. That spoils your copy and usually takes too long to be profitable. It means that you: • Plan the structure of your site’s content, organizing it into categories, eg, sports cars and family cars for a car site. • Allocate (eg,‘tag’) existing content to relevant categories. • Each category has a category home page, eg, a sports car page that lists links to relevant pages on your site. • Find target keyword niches for each category. Eg, italian sports cars, sports car insurance.

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• If a keyword niche is big then make it a category. Eg, italian sports cars might become a category. • For each target keyword niche, commission or write a long article with lots of words. • Don’t sweat on the individual keywords within your articles. Leaving that copy natural will target 1000s (sometimes tens of thousands) of keywords. The big job is the initial keyword research and subsequent site planning. • Analyze results. Which keyword niches bring the most response? Continue your keyword research – looking for more keyword niches to target. We’ll be exploring this process in more detail in the second and third parts of this book. If you have any questions about this book, or any related matters you’d like to discuss, drop by this page on the Wordtracker Academy. You can also join us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Also, you can take a 7-day free trial of Wordtracker Keywords Tool here and $1 onemonth trial of Wordtracker Strategizer here.

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Chapter 5: A keyword niche is … So single keywords are for losers and a shift in perspective to ‘keyword niches’ allows you to work at the scale required to maximize profit. In this chapter we’ll pin down the definition of a keyword niche with a look at some real life examples that show how single keywords miss the big picture and keyword niches reveal it. A single keyword is a word or phrase used to make a search on a search engine. A keyword niche is all keywords containing a single keyword. For example, you might search Google with the single keyword business strategy. The business strategy keyword niche is all the keywords containing business strategy including: business strategy business strategies business marketing strategy marketing business strategy business management strategy business development strategy business strategy development ... and many, many more

international business strategy business plan strategy business strategy consulting business marketing strategies small business strategy business strategy planning business corporate strategy

The business strategy keyword niche includes the long tail of search for the single keyword business strategy.

A keyword niche is like Broad match in AdWords If you’re familiar with Google AdWords, a keyword niche is like a Broad match view of a keyword. In AdWords you bid for the keywords you want your adverts to appear for when searched with on Google. Your bid must have a ‘match type’ and there are three keyword match types:

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• Exact match bid: Your ad will appear for the exact search business strategy and no other search.

• Phrase match bid: Your ad will appear for searches containing the words business strategy in that order, eg, business strategy development but not business management strategy. Wordtracker Masterclass: Keyword Research | 30


Part One: Chapter 5 | A keyword niche is…

• Broad match bid: Your ad will appear for searches containing the words business strategy in any order, eg, business strategy development and business management strategy.

So with a Broad match bid your advert will appear for all searches containing business strategy, ie, for all keywords in the business strategy keyword niche.

Keyword niches have long tails Much SEO advice talks about targeting single keywords. But this misses the big picture. Example … I have a page on a site that appears to target the single keyword:

swot analysis

Check a few metrics for this page and we see that the keyword swot analysis is ranked 24th on Google and got 69 visits in the last 30 days. About two a day. That’s not very good. But if we monitor how that page does for the swot analysis keyword niche then we see it does very well. See the grab below, from a Google Analytics report:

That’s traffic for 480 different keywords containing swot analysis, ie, keywords from the swot analysis keyword niche. Against just 69 for the single keyword swot analysis. That’s over 11 times the traffic from the keyword niche. That’s working at scale – 11 times the scale. That’s analyzing at scale with keyword niches. So don’t target single keywords. Target keyword niches. Let’s widen our perspective a little and see how the page does for the swot keyword niche (that’s all keywords containing swot). See image:

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That’s 1,673 visits from 849 different keywords. Let’s have a look at the top 25 of those keywords on the following page:

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Notice how the keyword niche’s seed word – swot (highlighted) – only brought 10 of those 1,673 visits. Single keywords miss the big picture. Single keywords really are for losers. So target keyword niches, but …


Target the head (of a keyword niche), exploit the tail (all the keywords in the keyword niche). Eg, target swot analysis (the head keyword for …) and get visits and response from keywords containing swot analysis (… the swot analysis keyword niche).

Wordtracker Strategizer will help you work with keyword niches If you are going to target niches, you need to analyze keyword niches. Unfortunately, site visitor analysis software like Google Analytics analyzes single keywords. You can manually convert those single keyword reports into keyword niche reports (and I show you how in chapter 7). But it takes a long time. Wordtracker Strategizer imports your Google Analytics single keyword reports and converts them into keyword niche reports. So when you look at a Strategizer report with a list of keywords, unlike on Google Analytics, you’re seeing data for keyword niches. Let’s compare the two ... On the Google Analytics report in the image below, the highlighted row shows us how the site performed for the single keyword business strategy (1,340 visits):

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On the Wordtracker Strategizer report in the image below, the highlighted row shows how the site performed for the keyword niche business strategy. The results are different. We see that the site got 3,764 visits from 965 different keywords containing business strategy.

Wordtracker Strategizer has a few other tricks. In the report above, note that we can also see Google’s estimate for the size of the business strategy niche (498,214 searches), and this site’s market share of that niche (0.76%). This shows us the potential this keyword niche offers the site. So with Wordtracker Strategizer you can analyze your site’s performance for keyword niches. This allows you to … • Work at the scale required for profit by targeting keyword niches. • Target keyword niches proven to deliver the best response to your site. • Target keyword niches you know your site can beat the competition for. • Target keyword niches you know your site can get more results for. • Discover the market size (the number of searches) for each target keyword niche. • Know how much effort each keyword niche should get. • Take the guesswork out of your search marketing. • Plan action-led search marketing strategies in minutes. We’ll explore this process in Part Three. Meanwhile, if you can’t wait to give Wordtracker Strategizer a go then you can take a month-long trial for $1.

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Chapter 6: Response response response Search marketing without measuring response is like flying blind or playing ‘pin the tail on the donkey’. You may get lucky but it’s no way to run a business.

You must choose your site’s own measures of response and make sure your website traffic analysis software, eg, Google Analytics (GA), is configured to track them. Let’s look at some typical response metrics used in Google Analytics (GA) and Wordtracker Strategizer. Here are four measures of response you get out of the box with GA:

• Visits

• Bounce rate

• Average pages per visit

• Average time on site

Visits is typically given as the antithesis of response – a meaningless metric for those who know no better. What use, after all, are visitors who buy nothing? That’s usually true but there are exceptions, such as:

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• You are confident that all your visitors are approximately in the right demographic and you’re happy to be presenting your brand to them.

• More visits = ad display = revenue.

• More visits = higher audited visitor numbers = higher ad revenue.



Part One: Chapter 6 | Response response response

• More visits opens doors to potential partners.

• Your client, boss or investor is impressed by visitor numbers.

Bounce rate is the % of visits that leave your site after seeing only one page. As such it’s a measure of the degree of interest a group of visitors have in your site. The Bounce rate for a keyword will show what % of visitors reached the site after searching with that keyword and then left after seeing only the page for which they entered. See Bounce Rate on Google Analytics below:

See Bounce Rate on Wordtracker Strategizer below:

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Average pages per visit is the average number of pages visited. Average pages per visit for a keyword shows the average number of pages visited by those who reached your site after searching with that keyword. Average time on site is the average length of time spent on the site. Average time on site for a keyword shows the average time spent on your site by those who reached your site after searching with that keyword.

Ecommerce response If you are selling products from your site then you really want to configure your site analytics software to measure the details of your sales. For example, Ecommerce On Google Analytics. Ecommerce on GA gives you the following ecommerce metrics that take you directly to sales, revenue and (if you know your margins) profit:

• Ecommerce conversion rate

• Per visit value

• Number of transactions

• Total revenue

Ecommerce Conversion Rate for a keyword (or any group of visitors) is the % of visitors that reached your site after searching with that keyword and then bought something from your site. For example, if 100 people reach your site searching with the keyword chocolate truffles and just one bought something then the Ecommerce Conversion Rate for the keyword chocolate truffles would be 1%. Per Visit Value for a keyword is the average amount of money spent on your site by visitors who reached your site after searching with that keyword. If 100 people reach your site searching with the keyword chocolate truffles and just one spent £200 then the Per Visit Value for the keyword chocolate truffles would be £2. Number of Transactions for a keyword is the number of times those who visited your site after searching with that keyword bought something. Wordtracker.com




If 100 people reach your site searching with the keyword chocolate truffles and just one bought something then the Number of Transactions for the keyword chocolate truffles would be 1. Total Revenue for a keyword is the total amount of money spent by those who visited your site after searching with that keyword. If 100 people reach your site searching with the keyword chocolate truffles and just one spent £200 then the Total Revenue for the keyword chocolate truffles would be £200.

Goals If you don’t sell products directly from your site then you can use Goals in Google Analytics to measure actions like these:

• Sign-ups to newsletters

• Downloads of free reports

• Visits to ‘deep interest’ pages that only interested customers would go to

Google Analytics allows you to assign a monetary value to such responses. See Goal Conversion Rate on Google Analytics below:

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See Goal Conversion Rate on Wordtracker Strategizer below:

If you have any questions about this book, or any related matters you’d like to discuss, drop by this page on the Wordtracker Academy. You can also join us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Also, you can take a 7-day free trial of Wordtracker Keywords Tool here and $1 onemonth trial of Wordtracker Strategizer here.

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Chapter 7: Simplify SEO by building on success

Your quickest and easiest route to more traffic and response with search engine optimization is to build on any success you already have. The keywords that already bring response are your low-hanging fruit and getting more results from them is child’s play.

Of course, this can only work once you have some organic search engine traffic. New sites require different keyword research and SEO tactics (see Part Two of this book).

How to find your target keywords Here’s a really, really, really easy way to find the best keywords to target: 1) Look at the (unpaid) keyword reports on your site’s traffic analysis software (eg, Google Analytics). 2) Target the keywords your site is most successful for. 3) … er, that’s it. You can target the same keywords with PPC too. To work at the scale required for most sites to maximize profit, make sure you target keyword niches and not single keywords. With your target keywords chosen, here are three ways of easily getting more results from them … Wordtracker.com



Part One: Chapter 7 | Simplify SEO by building on success

1) Ranking higher on Google (for the same keywords) Any increase in ranking on a Google search results page will increase your traffic. And to get from 9th to 8th or 3rd to 2nd (for example) is easier than getting results from a starting position of no ranking at all (as you must with ‘new’ keywords you have no traffic for). You might rank 3rd on Google for a keyword. If you can get to rank 1st then you should quadruple traffic for that keyword. For example, a website (and these are real figures) ranks 3rd for corporate culture and it brought 729 visits last month. See image from a Google Analytics report showing this:

If that site can move up to the top slot (no.1 on Google) for corporate culture then it should get nearly 3,000 visits a month for that single keyword.

2) Target down the long tail Target other keywords containing your target keywords – in other words, the keyword niches. For example, that same website gets 1,609 visits a month from 453 different (single) keywords containing corporate culture, ie, from the corporate culture keyword niche. See image from a Google Analytics report showing those results (note how the report says I’ve “filtered” the results – we’ll come back to this):

Here’s the top 10 of those 453 keywords (to get this report I again used the filter on the keywords report to show only keywords containing corporate culture):

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The site can easily get more success from thousands more keywords in the corporate culture keyword niche by: • Using the keyword on appropriate pages. Eg, we can see there are searches with the pattern [‘company name’ & corporate culture] eg, boeing corporate culture. (Research with Wordtracker’s Keywords Tool will reveal more patterns like this.) So if the site has pages that get results for company names (and it does) then I just have to add corporate culture to those pages and I’ll likely get results. (This tactic has been used on this site bring over 1,000 visits a day). • Write a new page about corporate culture. You might get ideas for such pages by entering corporate culture into the Wordtracker Keywords tool. This ensures the new content is about subjects that are being searched for. Targeting other keywords down the long tail of the keywords works and is easy because: • The factors that made your site do well for your already-successful keywords, eg, corporate culture, will help your site for other keywords that include them, eg, boeing corporate culture.

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• There is usually less competition for those long tail keywords. So that ‘help’ is usually enough to get results. This principle is behind the mantra:


• The long tail is almost infinitely long.

3) Target up the long tail As sure as every keyword has its own long tail (a keyword niche) it is part of another long tail. For example, japanese corporate culture has a long tail (a keyword niche) of keywords containing japanese corporate culture and is also part of the long tail of keywords containing corporate culture. So when our example site finds success for the keyword japanese corporate culture, it can work down the japanese corporate culture tail as well as up the corporate culture tail. For this tactic, we can reverse our mantra to:

exploit the tail, target the head

Targeting ‘up the tail’ is harder as such keywords are usually more popular and competitive. But again you are given a head start (pun intended) against the competition by the same factors that made your tail keyword successful. For example, an inbound link containing the keyword japanese corporate culture will help you be successful for corporate culture (and vice versa). Always try to make sure you are targeting ‘up’ as well as ‘down the tail’. Typical tactics would be to: • Use a category page to target a competitive head keyword, eg, corporate culture. Note that the focus may be on a single keyword (the head) but the goal is the whole body and the tail (the keyword niche). • Use pages in that category (linked to from the category page of course) to target its long tail keywords’ niches, eg, japanese corporate culture.

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The head, the long tail and keyword niche are all relative terms The concepts of the head, the tail and keyword niches are always relative to your perspective and the context in which they are used. When talking about ‘all searches on the internet’, head keywords are the most searched for. They include keywords like yahoo, google, facebook and the names of celebrities of the day (as I write, kate gosselin hairstyle is popular!) See more in Wordtracker’s top keywords reports.

Down your long tail For your site, your head keywords are those that bring the most traffic. Then, if you look at any one keyword on your site, eg, corporate culture, its keyword niche is all keywords containing it, including japanese corporate culture. And of course japanese corporate culture has its own keyword niche. Each keyword niche, no matter how big or small, has its own head keyword and long tail.

Up your long tail If our perspective is the keyword corporate culture, we can look up the long tails of the corporate and culture keyword niches which corporate culture is itself a part of. It’s all relative.

Write it and they will come You can’t possibly specifically optimize for thousands of long tail keywords. You can’t even look at them on a list because there are too many; and many of the tail’s keywords have not yet been thought of or searched with (the long tail never stops growing). But use these keyword research techniques to make sure you’re pointing in the right direction (targeting the right keyword niches) and then write (or commission or

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encourage users to write). You’ll find that ranking success, visitors and response will come. Write it and they will come.

Why it works We’ve seen that it’s possible to get more results by targeting the keywords you are already successful for. That’s good, but why these keywords rather than others? You can get results from other keywords too – some may be searched with more and have less competition. So why are your currently successful keywords better for your site? First, you don’t know for sure that other keywords will deliver response to your site. When targeting keywords you already get results for, you can make sure they are keywords that deliver response. That’s very good, but it gets better because you can target your most responsive keywords. And your most responsive keywords might be two, three, five or even ten times as responsive as others. That’s outstanding, but the best bit is yet to come. So far you know:

• it’s always possible to get more traffic from a keyword (and keyword niche) you’re already successful for; and …

• you can get response from these keywords (they already deliver that – it’s proven, not guesswork); but …

• (this is the bit I love) you also know that you can beat the competition on Google for these keywords.

You know you can beat the competition because you already are beating the competition enough to get at least some traffic. So do just a little bit more work and you’ll get more traffic and response.

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Excellent. I’d say ‘incredible’ (which means ‘beyond belief’) but what’s incredible is that it’s not the first lesson in SEO school. If it was then you would be doing it already. If you are doing it already, well done – but don’t put your feet up because the competition is always chasing you and I just told them what to do. Sorry about that. But whilst the competition try and catch up you can learn how to scale up your SEO with keyword niches and Wordtracker Strategizer.

Dig deep and you will find gold Once you understand how easy SEO can be (when targeting the keywords you are already successful for) you still need to prioritize because the chances are your site is successful for thousands of keywords. You might simply go to your site analytics software (eg, Google Analytics) and sort your keyword reports by your chosen response metric (perhaps bounce rate, visits or ecommerce conversion rates). This will show your most responsive keywords. And the chances are you’ll see amazing response rates. 100% conversion rates are common for some keywords (even higher but let’s not go there now). Here is such a report:

Nice, but … You look again and see these 100% response keywords only have one visit.

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And do you know how popular the keyword is? Does it get searched with often? Off to Wordtracker Keywords Tool to find out. The keyword probably isn’t used much (most aren’t) … (mmm this is starting to take some time isn’t it? Keep reading – help is coming). Then you remember that ‘single keywords are for losers’ because they rarely bring enough traffic and response. And your Google Analytics keyword report is showing you results for single keywords. You want to see results for keyword niches.

How to manually convert your Google Analytics keyword reports into keyword niche reports You can get keyword niche reports with the filter on Google Analytics keywords reports? Yes, that can work a treat (up to the point at which you need sleep because it takes so long). But if you have plenty of time, here’s how to use it:

• Use the advanced filter to see, say, keywords bringing more than 200 visits.

• Then sort those results by your chosen response metric.

• For each promising keyword you now want keyword niche results. And you’re going to have to do each one manually (this bit sucks) …

• Put the keyword into the filter to get keyword niche results (summarized at the top each report).

• Record the results in a spreadsheet.

• Repeat for other high-response keywords.

• Now enter the keywords into the Wordtracker Keywords Tool to get estimates of each keyword niche size. Add the results to your spreadsheet.

• Keep digging and you will find gold – your most responsive keyword niches. And you’ll know how popular each keyword niche is so you can plan an appropriate amount of work for each one.

This manual method works. I used it for years as a professional SEO and I’ve taught it in training sessions and some articles (see The SEO pro’s secret path). But it really does take a long time to use it thoroughly. And you get a static snapshot with no trends.

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A site with 100,000 visits a month might get results from 50,000 different keywords. You could die before you’ve manually reported on each of those keyword niches. Gold digging was never really going to be easy though, was it? Actually it is ...

Wordtracker Strategizer automates your keyword research Digging for gold is now easy because we have Wordtracker Strategizer which automates and dramatically improves the above process I’ve successfully used as a professional SEO. With Wordtracker’s Strategizer, in a few minutes you can have a report for your site that shows you: • Your top 2,000 keyword niches (your keyword reports are imported from Google Analytics and converted from single keyword-to-keyword niche reports). • Your most responsive keyword niches (so you’re working at scale). • The size of each of those keyword niches, ie, how many searches are made (this data is imported from Google). • Your market share for each keyword niche. • Advice on what work to do to target each keyword niche for both SEO and PPC. • Historical seasonal trend reports for keyword niches. • Historical seasonal trend reports from Google Insights. • The ability to dig into a keyword niche to find the keywords within it. Here’s an example of a Strategizer report for the business management site we’ve been using as an example:

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The above report is sorted by response rate (highlighted in blue) so we can see the site’s most responsive keyword niches. The Niche Size column shows us Google’s estimates of how many searches were made with these keywords. With a click I’ve chosen to ‘target’ three of the keyword niches shown and they become highlighted in red. Strategizer will save those for me and use them for trend reports (shown in the graphs), exporting, and other features like opening a Google Insights report like this:

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Strategizer shows you data for keyword niches. For example, the business concepts row shown in the image below reports average results for all keywords containing business concepts:

The keywords column tells us that for this period (and therefore this report) the site received visits from searchers who used 50 different exact (single) keywords containing business concepts. You can see those keywords by clicking the ‘Keywords In Niche’ link. See image:

You can take a one-month trial of Wordtracker Strategizer for $1.

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Chapter 8: The importance of context Context is king. Keyword research, pay per click (PPC) advertising and search engine optimization (SEO) must serve your company’s business, its products, strategy and marketing. Here we’ll explore that context and ask what you are selling and who you are selling it to. Only then can you start your search for the keywords your target audience is searching with.

What are you selling? Marketing starts with a product or a service to be sold. For non-profits there might be a message to convey but you still want response so everything in this book is still relevant. If you are an existing business then you know what you’re selling. For example, you might own a shoe shop selling different types and brands of shoes. You might extend or narrow your range but you are still a shoe shop selling shoes. You might be an affiliate marketer looking for markets and niches to sell to (a niche hunter). You start on affiliate forums and use keyword research tools to hunt for new niches to sell to but eventually you’ll reach the point at which you know what you’re trying to sell. Business can start when you know what you’re selling.

Who are you selling to? Once you know what you’re selling you need to decide who you want to sell it to. Where are they? What country? What region? What city? At home or at work? What do they do? Until you have real traffic to your website, you’re going to have to make some judgement calls in your keyword research. The more you know about who you’re selling to, the better your judgement will be and the easier it will be to discover the keywords your target buyers use to search for what you’re selling.

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Part One: Chapter 8 |The importance of context

Keyword research must serve company, marketing and sales strategy (and tactics) Keyword research is primarily part of your online marketing strategy, which serves your company marketing strategy and in turn your company strategy. Make sure you know what they are. What is your company trying to achieve? Short term profits? Market share? A float or sale in two years? This affects the goals of your keyword research. For example:

• If company goals are short term then you should put less effort into the most competitive keywords that might take years to prove successful.

• If your company is considering a sale or float then your boss might want success for some ‘trophy’ keywords that impress potential investors regardless of their profitability.

Your shoe shop might sell all kinds of shoes but your strategy might be to focus on women’s up-market designer shoes and branded sneakers. Knowing this, your keyword research will concentrate on those markets. Also, you’re more likely to know what to look for when considering keywords related to the interests of your target buyers. Strategies need tactics. Tactics are the methods you use to achieve your goals. For example:

• To help sell sneakers, your company marketing strategy might be to invest in celebrity endorsement. If so, your keyword research would consider the celebrities and what they do.

• Or your company might sponsor local sports teams. In which case your keyword research would consider those teams and the events they play in.

• To sell women’s up-market designer shoes, your company marketing strategy might draw upon their use in fashion shows, films or on TV. Your keyword research can explore related keywords.

Marketing gets the message across but how does your company intend to make sales? For example:

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• Does it use face-to-face visits by reps? In which case you might not be so interested in keywords used by those looking to buy now.




• Are you selling on price? If so, price-related keywords, like those containing cheap and deal, will be of interest.

• Is quality and service to be the deal-closer? That might make you look more closely at keywords containing best, quality and service.

Hopefully you get the idea. Understand the context within which your keyword research should take place. Support your marketing and company strategies and tactics and you’re more likely to be successful. Indeed, your marketing and company strategies define the success of your keyword research.

Finding the keywords your targets are searching with With the context established, you can start your keyword research and find the keywords your target buyers search with. This seems simple enough – find the keywords your target buyers search with and then use search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) advertising to get your website found on Google when those searches are made. For example: You’re selling Nike sneakers so you look for relevant keywords containing Nike. But keyword research is a little more complicated because:

• You might quickly find thousands of different keywords that are relevant to your site.

• We talk about keywords but we usually mean keyword niches. Eg, all keywords containing nike basketball shoes.

• Keyword niches usually contain thousands (or more) different keywords.

• Keyword research soon becomes more about prioritizing keywords than finding them.

Prioritizing possible target keywords focuses around three types of metrics:

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• Popularity. Some keywords are searched with more than others.

• Response. Some keywords will give your site significantly higher response rates than others.




• Competition. Some keywords will have less, and easier-to-beat, competition than others.

Prioritizing, Popularity, Response and Competition will be recurring themes throughout this book, your keyword research and subsequent search marketing. If you have any questions about this book, or any related matters you’d like to discuss, drop by this page on the Wordtracker Academy. You can also join us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Also, you can take a 7-day free trial of Wordtracker Keywords Tool here and $1 onemonth trial of Wordtracker Strategizer here.

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Chapter 9: The keyword research process Let’s summarize the major steps of our keyword research process before we go into the details. There are two clear parts to the keyword research process: 1) The Keyword Research Funnel is for sites without organic (non-paid) search engine traffic. 2) The Keyword Research Circle of Response is for sites with organic search engine traffic. If your site is new then you must start with the Keyword Research Funnel. When your site has consistent organic traffic from search engines you can move on to the Keyword Research Circle of Response. Sites with existing organic search engine traffic can jump straight into the Circle of Response. Let’s look at both parts in a little more detail and then see a diagram-flow-chart typething you can print out and put on your wall …

Keyword Research Funnel By taking the following five major steps in the Keyword Research Funnel you will find, prioritize and verify your first target keyword niches.

1) Find target markets Find the keywords associated with your target markets – the products and services you sell and the audiences you are selling to.

2) Prioritize target keyword niches Within each target market find and prioritize keyword niches.

3) Create first content Create pages on your site for each of your target keyword niches.

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Part One: Chapter 9 | The keyword research process

4) PPC to verify target keywords Use pay per click (PPC) advertising to discover if those searching with your target keywords will respond on your website. You are verifying your keyword research with real paid-for searches.

5) SEO for verified keywords Invest with search engine optimization (SEO) to achieve organic (non-paid) search engine traffic in the keyword niches for which PPC has proven to deliver response. When your site has consistent organic traffic you can move to the Keyword Research Circle of Response …

Keyword Research Circle of Response The Keyword Research Circle of Response is a virtuous circular process based on the principle of exploiting the keyword niches proven to be the most profitable on your site. It has the following four major stages:

A) Find new priority target keyword niches Target your site’s most responsive keyword niches from organic (non-paid) visits. These are found simply with Wordtracker Strategizer (or manually, if you prefer).

B) Find new keyword niches within target niches Dig into your target keyword niches to find new sub-niches to target.

C) Invest in new target keyword niches Create and optimize new (or existing) content for your new target keyword niches.

D) For max ROI use marginal response & profit To truly maximize your return on investment (ROI), convert response into profit and use marginal response rates to choose your target keyword niches. Which takes you back to A (for this is a virtuous circle). Here’s that diagram-flow-chart type-thing ...

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Part One: Chapter 9 | The keyword research process

The Keyword Research Process

We’ll look at the Keyword Research Funnel in detail in Part Two and at the Keyword Research Circle of Response in Part Three.

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Part Two

Keyword research for new sites


Introduction

The Keyword Research Funnel Find, prioritize & verify target keywords Keyword research for a new site can seem difficult and is often made complicated. You can simplify it by starting with these two goals: 1. Only create site content you would want, whether or not it brings traffic or response. So no work you do is wasted. 2. Achieve your first organic search engine traffic. So you can then target keywords proven to bring response. For new sites we use the Keyword Research Funnel which has the following five steps:

1) Find target markets 2) Prioritize target keyword niches 3) Create first content 4) PPC to verify target keywords 5) SEO for verified keywords When your site has consistent organic traffic from search engines, you can move to

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Part Two: Introduction | The keyword research funnel. Find, prioritize & verify target keywords

the Keyword Research Circle of Response (which we explore in Part Three of this book). Let’s summarize each of those five steps before we go through them in detail …

1) Find target markets Identify the markets you want to target. This might be the markets you must target because the products and services you sell can’t be changed. You will be finding the keywords that represent the markets you will sell to. Eg, you might sell tea (keyword: tea) and your markets might be tea and its ‘children’ herbal tea and green tea. These are not yet the specific keywords you will optimize for. You will find those later when you explore inside each chosen target market.

2) Prioritize target keyword niches Here you explore inside each chosen target market to find target keywords. Eg, a target market might be herbal tea and your target keyword niche is herbal tea benefits. As discussed earlier you aren’t really targeting the exact (single) keyword herbal tea benefits; you are targeting all keywords containing herbal tea benefits, ie, the herbal tea benefits keyword niche.

3) Create first content Now you build your site with a structure to match your target markets, target keyword niches and their matching pages. Of course, you may already have a site. In which case you must carve out your wanted structure with existing and new pages and menus. Either way you will have a page for each of your target keyword niches.

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Part Two: Introduction | The keyword research funnel. Find, prioritize & verify target keywords

4) PPC to verify target keywords’ response Now you find out if your site can sell anything to people searching with your target keywords. If you’re just into branding (many are) then you find out if those searchers like your site. If your site doesn’t sell to your targets then you either change your marketing, your products or your target keyword niches. For example, you might have chosen to target herbal tea benefits but PPC tests show you that those searching with that keyword don’t buy anything from your site. The result is a list of target keyword niches (I really mean those who search with them) that you know you can sell to if you can just get them to your site.

5) SEO for verified keywords This is going well. You’ve proved your targets bring response. But can you beat the competition on Google and get organic (unpaid for) visits for these keyword niches? Only one way to find out … Optimize your target keyword niches’ pages for search engines and keep doing so until you get some visits. When your site has consistent organic traffic you can move to the Keyword Research Circle of Response which we explore in Part Three. Let’s go to step 1 of the Keyword Research Funnel and find some target markets …

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Part Two: Keyword Research Funnel | Step 1. Find target markets

Keyword Research Funnel Step 1. Find target markets Find the keywords associated with your target markets – the products and services you sell and the audiences you are selling to.

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Chapter 10: Find target markets You must find your search marketing’s target markets. And you must find your target markets’ associated keywords – the words and phrases used to search Google, Yahoo and Bing. You are looking for big markets at the start of your keyword research process. So if you are selling cars, the markets might include cars, family cars, sports cars and ford cars. When you move from target markets to target keywords they won’t be exact keywords like family cars. They will come from within the family cars keyword niche, eg, cool family cars or big family cars. We’ll find those later.

Keyword research starts with seed keywords Seed keywords are the core of a market or keyword niche. Eg, the seed keyword of the donuts keyword niche is donuts. The donuts keyword niche is all keywords containing donut, including glazed donuts and chocolate donuts. So if you’re making a search on a keyword research tool like the Wordtracker Keywords Tool, enter a seed word or words, like this:

The image above shows a search configured for the Wordtracker database (the Wordtracker radio button has been selected). But we are going to start by using the Google database. See following page:

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Part Two: Chapter 10 | Find target markets

The seed keyword in the example images above is tea. You might sell chocolate and start with, well, chocolate. Starting with chocolate, you might expand and find more seed keywords like gourmet chocolate, chocolate desserts and organic chocolate. These keywords are all markets (as well as keyword niches) that you might target and build content for on your site. Don’t forget that goal:

Only create site content you would want, whether or not it brings traffic or response. So no work you do is wasted.

Think about this when you are considering a possible target market. Do you want the content that you’ll need to create to target that market? Let’s explore some different ways of finding possible seed keywords …

What are you selling again? Return to your background research when you asked yourself what you are selling and write down relevant products and markets. Perhaps you and I together are launching a gourmet tea site that sells tea, including:

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green tea oolong tea herbal tea black tea

white tea yellow tea specialist tea

Always ask yourself how these subjects might relate to the keywords customers search with. No detailed research is required yet. I just want you to keep reminding yourself that you will be looking for the keywords your customers use. Save all these potential target keywords in a file called Potential Target Markets.

What do you and your employees think? Think beyond the products you sell. Consider problems you solve and related subjects that people talk about and want to know about. (If you’re an agency ask your clients these questions.) You are an expert in your field. Write down relevant words, subjects, products, etc. Imagine you are an osteopath – you might write down some possible seed keywords like these:

back pain osteopath

osteopathy neck pain

Add the ideas you like to your Potential Target Markets file.

Listen to your customers Listen to the words your customers use. Read their emails. Look at forums, Facebook and other social media sites. The words people use are the words they will search with. Your potential customers might say physio, physician, doctor or back doctor. Back to tea: customers might be asking for zhu ye qing green tea or porcelain tea sets that do justice to their gourmet tea. Add the ideas you like to your Potential Target Markets file.

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Read the best and most popular relevant websites Search Google with a seed keyword you like. Eg, osteopath or chocolates or tea (I’m running three examples here side by side – you can handle that, can’t you?). Also make searches like these:

chocolate

osteopath

tea

chocolate blog

osteopath blog

tea blog

chocolate forum

osteopath forum

tea forum

chocolate help

osteopath help

tea help

chocolate community

osteopath community

tea community

Read the resulting websites that most impress you and take notes about the subjects they cover and the relevant words they use. For a chocolate site you might find:

luxury chocolates cocoa

belgian chocolates hand made chocolate

Or for the osteopathy website:

cranial osteopathy visceral osteopathy lower back pain

sports injuries trapped nerve

And for tea:

black tea green tea benefits cream tea

brewed tea oolong tea

Always be looking for subjects and words that are relevant to your business. Add the ideas you like to your Potential Target Markets file. Always be asking yourself if you can use possible seed keywords in content that you’re happy to have on your website. Eg, articles, blog posts, news stories, videos, photo collections, product pages, etc.

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For example, perhaps you find the market niche strawberry chocolates but don’t sell strawberry chocolates. You might still write about strawberry chocolates in the hope of selling something different to those searching for them. But chances are you have something more relevant to write about. And is our gourmet tea site going to write about cream teas?

Create a new Project and a Potential Target Markets List in Wordtracker You’ve been saving all your possible target keywords in your Potential Target Markets file. You’re now going to put them into a Wordtracker List inside a new Wordtracker Project like this … Create a project in Wordtracker from the dashboard.

Enter your Potential Target Markets keywords into the Keywords Tool as seed keywords.

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Look for your target markets in your results and save them to a new list (Potential Target Markets). ‘Select None’

Select those you want to add (with the check box).

Use Wordtracker Keywords Tool’s Related Keywords Tool I like all the methods given so far but Wordtracker Keywords Tool’s Related Keywords Tool is my favorite. I’ll call it the Orange Tool because, er, it’s orange and ‘Wordtracker Keywords Tool’s Related Keywords Tool’ is a bit long. To use the Orange Tool, you simply enter a single seed word (or phrase) and get up to 300 related keywords back. The image on the following page shows the first 21 results for separate searches with chocolate, osteopath and tea.

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You can only see the top 21 Related Tool results in the above images but if you dig down then you’ll always find plenty of interesting keywords. Plenty of keywords to consider there. If any look like a potential market then … Click ‘search’ next to any keywords you want to add to your Potential Target Markets List

Then click ‘Search & Save’

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The results will be a search in the Keywords (Blue) Tool from which you can add wanted keywords to your Potential Target Markets List as described above. The Orange Related Keywords Tool is a simple thing but it found the following potential target markets for our tea site:

herbal tea black tea green tea white tea organic tea loose tea tea gifts iced tea

gourmet tea tea leaves oolong loose leaf tea tea bags earl grey herbal assam flavored tea darjeeling rooibos decaf teapots specialty tea

Keywords for content ideas Whilst researching, you may see keywords that give you ideas for content on your sites but don’t fit into your chosen target markets. Save them to a new list called, eg, Tea Content Ideas. For example, I’ve just seen the keyword strip teas – a misspelling of striptease. I don’t know how yet but I think I can find a way of using the resulting pun in the headline of an amusing blog post. If that post works well and other sites link to it using the title then our tea site will get inbound links containing tea in their link text (which is a good thing for our SEO). Similarly, I found honest tea and proper tea. And honest tea, everyone knows that all proper tea is theft, don’t they?

There are 46 keywords in our Potential Target Markets List. Here are the top 11 (by search volume):

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Choose your target markets You can spend forever adding keywords to your Potential Target Markets List. Much better to push on. Make adding to this list a permanent process but for now – get to the party. (If you find any other keywords you do want to add later then add them to your list and put them through this same process.) Time to review your Potential Target Markets List. You may have got carried away and added keywords that aren’t relevant enough. If so, delete them. All remaining keywords should be relevant to your products and services and worth targeting. But you can’t do everything at once. You must prioritize. You must pick a list of markets to target. To do so, work in a duplicate (copy) of your Potential Target Markets List. In Potential Target Markets (copy), select 5-15 keywords (the specific amount isn’t important) for a new Target Markets List. The image below shows some Potentials ‘checked’.

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Move your selected keywords to a new list and call it ‘Target Markets List’.

Use just two criteria to choose your Target Markets List: 1) Appropriateness. How likely do you think it is you can sell your products to those searching with keywords in the potential market’s keyword niche? Eg, can you sell iced tea, organic tea, japanese tea, cream tea? 2) Size (number of searches). The size of a market is of interest because inside big markets (big keyword niches) we are likely to find smaller keyword niches that we can compete for. These will contain the actual keywords you target.

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Our tea site example now has 10 target markets:

Those search figures are Google’s estimates of the number of monthly searches with keywords containing those shown. Google uses a sample of real searches to make its estimates. We’re about to look at the same keywords using Wordtracker’s database and the figures will be quite different. Wordtracker also uses a database of real searches but the search numbers shown are the actual number of searches in the database (no extrapolations or estimates are made). The specific numbers are of little interest. All we want at the moment are some clues that there are searches being made and rough ideas of relative size.

Next The next step in the keyword research process is to find perhaps 5-10 target keyword niches within each of your target markets. Eg, you might choose green tea benefits from within the green tea keyword niche. You’ll need a new or existing page for each. But first we are going to look at how all this content must be organized. You’ll see how your keyword research translates to site structure and content.

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Chapter 11: Planning your site structure with keyword research

Your keyword research is doing more than just finding keywords to target. To get search engine traffic from those keywords they must be used on the pages of your website. But not all on the same page. And different pages shouldn’t target the same keyword. To simplify a point to make it clear – each target keyword needs its own page. That page is then optimized for that keyword (more accurately for that keyword niche). Just remember that phrases need pages. Those pages will need to be organized into groups which I’ll call categories. You’re not just finding keywords to target. You’re building websites. Or organizing existing sites. In other words, keyword research is how we plan the structure and content of our website. This is why SEOs always groan and roll their eyes when they hear that SEO has not been considered until after a site’s content is planned. Let’s look at how a site might be structured. Keeping things simple, you have the:

• Home page

• Category pages

• Content pages that are linked to from relevant category pages

Let’s get visual. Here’s that structure for a very simple site …

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Part Two: Chapter 11 | Planning your site structure with keyword research

Each of your target markets is a category (we say it is mapped to a category). And each category has a category home page that links to content pages, eg, articles, blog posts, products. Using our tea site example (I’ll use just three markets with three content pages each), the site plan might look like this: With the below (still very simplified) site plan:

The home page targets the keyword niche tea (tea has been mapped to the home page). We might add some less competitive target keywords to the home page like buy tea online. So the home page:

• targets the highly competitive keyword niche tea

• targets some less competitive child niches

• supports (links to) category pages for target markets

One category targets the green tea market and therefore the green tea keyword niche. That category’s home page will focus its SEO on green tea.

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If green tea is too competitive a niche then in the same way that our home page also targeted some easier child niches, so can a category page. Content pages (eg, articles, videos, news stories, blog posts) that are linked to from the green tea category page are about aspects of green tea. They focus their SEO on appropriate ‘child’ keyword niches, eg:

green tea benefits chinese green tea green tea caffeine

A second category targets the herbal tea market and keyword niche. That category’s home page will focus its SEO on herbal tea. Content pages (eg, articles, videos, news stories, blog posts) that are linked to from the herbal tea category page can contain writing about aspects of herbal tea. They focus their SEO on appropriate ‘child’ keyword niches, eg:

herbal tea benefits camomile herbal tea lemon herbal tea

Note I’m targeting benefits again – creating a theme. So work targeting green tea benefits will help get results for herbal tea benefits and vice versa. A third category targets the oolong tea keyword niche in a similar way. Remember, this is all very simplified still. What you really need to learn here is that:

• Your chosen target markets are mapped to categories on your site. Each category has a category home page, creating big themes (or channels) of content.

• Category pages list links to relevant pages, eg, the green tea category links to pages about green tea, each targeting a child niche of green tea like green tea benefits.

• Your site’s home page links to your category pages.

And this bit is really important …

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• Don’t yet worry about what your content pages will be about.




• Your job (at this stage in the keyword research process) is to plan the structure of your site.

• Always get your site structure right first.

Let’s get some help planning site structures …

Using mind maps to help plan your site’s structure Some people can easily visualize a site’s structure from looking at a list of target niches like this one for an osteopath’s website:

plantar fasciitis sciatica back pain lower back pain tennis elbow frozen shoulder headaches neck pain

torticollis osteopathic medicine ankle sprain osteopathy physiotherapy osteopath osteopathic complementary medicine

cranial osteopathy jumpers knee backache trapped nerve painful jaw osteopathy treatment visceral osteopathy sports injuries

Some can look at a list like that above and say something like:

• There are some different types of keyword niches there: symptoms, conditions, parts of the body, types of osteopathy.

• I can help users by offering them groups of categories, perhaps in separate menus like Sports Injuries, Conditions, Where Does It Hurt? and About Osteopathy. Those same mental jugglers might do the same just by looking at a list of target niches in a Wordtracker Project like this:

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Mind maps can help the rest of us visualize the same structures. There is a lot of different software available to help you with mind maps. I use Free Mind because it has a Google Wave plugin and I love using Google Wave when working with clients and remote teams. The image below shows how you can use mind map software to plan site structure:

The structure shown above is similar to the one I described with words earlier. I’ve put the target markets’ niches into three groups and even placed one (lower back pain) as a child of another (back pain). Internal linking in a website is a crucial part of search

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engine optimization (SEO). For that reason, I would still link from the home page directly to all of these pages. Read more about the importance of site structure, menus and linking directly pages in Are your Superman pages trapped in a basement full of kryptonite?

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Part Two: Keyword Research Funnel | Step 2. Prioritize target keyword niche

Keyword Research Funnel Step 2. Prioritize target keyword niches Within each target market find and prioritize keyword niches.

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Chapter 12: Prioritize keywords

within each category

Each of your target markets is a big keyword niche. For example, all keywords containing green tea or organic tea. And each will have has its own category with a category home page on your site. Within each of your target markets’ big keyword niches you must find some child or sub-keyword niches to target. Eg, from within green tea you might target green tea benefits, green tea extract, benefits of green tea and green tea weight loss from among many thousands more. We’ll see it’s often easy to find hundreds or thousands of keyword niches within your target markets. But you can’t work on all relevant and interesting keyword niches at once. Each needs a page. You can’t instantly create hundreds or thousands of pages. Or if you already have those pages you can’t optimize them all at once. You must prioritize. Here I’ll show you how to choose about five keyword niches for each target market. These keyword niches can be mapped to new or existing pages. So each of your target market’s category pages will link to at least five pages. You might have many more pages but these are the ones you are prioritizing. Five pages for each of, say, five categories = 25 pages. It’s just a start, just suggested numbers. Do what’s right for your level of resources. You are choosing which keyword niches to take forward to the next stage of the keyword research process. Then, if some pay per click (PPC) advertising shows that your site gets response from these keyword niches you will optimize their pages for organic search engine traffic. Let’s get going …

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Part Two: Chapter 12 | Prioritize keywords within each category

Start with your top target market For our tea site, we have the following Target Markets List:

For each target market, repeat the following steps (which we look at in detail below): a) Search Wordtracker’s database with the target market seed keyword, eg, green tea i) Choose your search database’s country of origin (US or UK). ii) Configure the misspellings, plurals and ‘adult keywords’ settings. iii) Configure the tool’s ‘match type’. iv) Add any negative keywords you don’t want matches for, eg, oil, clothing v) Save results to a new List b) Assess the most Popular keywords. Study. c) Assess the most Competitive keywords. Sort by IAAT. Study.

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d) Assess Popularity/Competition ratio part 1 (KEI). ‘Select & save’ any targets to new Target Keywords List. e) Assess Popularity/Competition ratio part 2 (KEI3). ‘Select & save’ again. f) Review Target Keywords List. g) Verify with Google data. We’ll now go through those steps using green tea as our example target market …

a) Search Wordtracker’s database with the target market seed keyword In your Target Market List, click ‘search’ then click ‘Search’. See image:

Make sure the resulting search is of the Wordtracker database and the country of your choice (just US or UK, as I write). If the search was of the wrong country then correct the configuration and repeat the search. Configure the misspellings, plurals and ‘adult keywords’ settings. Choose plural and no misspellings. Your ‘adult’ choice is your business. Configure the tool’s ‘match type’. I usually recommend ‘Keywords in any order’ but try that and ‘Exact keyword inside a search term’. Your search will look like this:

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The different ‘match types’ should be explained:

• Keywords in any order (Broad Match) – a search for tennis shoes will match all tennis shoe, shoes for tennis and tennis shoes my birthday.

• Exact keyword inside a search term (Phrase Match) – a search for tennis shoe will match all tennis shoes and tennis shoes for my birthday but not shoes for tennis.

• Exact keyword only (Exact Match) – a search for tennis shoes will only match tennis shoes.

The above search gives 1,000 different keywords. The image below shows just the first 14.

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We need to do some filtering. Two of those results look like rogue words:

green tea has more vitamin c than black tea

strawberry shortcake tiny treats tea blossom grape green apple

I’ve decided these are rogue words because it just looks so unlikely they would be so popular. All databases of real searches have these rogue words in them and you will learn to spot them. It’s part of the craft of keyword research. There may also be types of keywords I’m not interested in like green tea clothing. Find results you don’t want and add them as negative keywords by inserting a ‘-’ before them. Then repeat the search. For example, in the above results I found the following:

-clothing -shortcake -pills -moisturizer

-garden -anchor -herbasway -more vitamin c

And from previous searches with tea I noted these:

-party -bagging -bagged -bagger -leoni

-island -cake -oil -cup pigs

Negative keywords are a powerful tool allowing me to see up to 1,000 keywords without those irrelevant to me. See image on the following page:

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Save the results to a new list called ‘green tea’.

Save your negative keywords Save your list of negative keywords to a negative list (which in this example, I call ‘tea negatives’). You might want them later for more searches or especially for PPC. Ian Howie introduces the power of negative keywords for PPC here and explores this in more detail in his PPC Masterclass.

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b) Assess the most Popular keywords Here is how the first 11 keywords in our green tea list look:

As the list above is sorted by Searches, the keywords we can see are the most Popular. We won’t choose any keywords to target yet but it’s worth knowing what the ‘big guns’ are.

c) Assess the most Competitive keywords It makes little difference how popular a keyword is if you can’t beat the Competition. So you need to find out about the pages you’ll have to beat if you want to be found on search engines for your target keywords. Wordtracker provides a few metrics to help us. Wordtracker’s Competition metrics are:

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• Google Count

• IA (In Anchor)

• IAAT (In Anchor And Title)




You can see them (well, two of them) by clicking ‘Get additional metrics’:

Let’s have a look at each of these …

Google Count Google Count is the number of sites on Google competing for a keyword. This gives no measure of the quality of that competition and for that reason I don’t pay any attention to it. You can see Google Count figures on the right-hand column of the image below:

IA (In Anchor) IA (In Anchor) is the number of pages with inbound links that contain the keyword in their anchor text. Anchor text is the words a user actually clicks when following a link (often in blue and underlined like the underlined blue words in the image above).

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Anchor text is the most important single factor considered by Google when assessing how a page should rank for a keyword. To simplify with an example … If a page is targeting the keyword niche green tea then:

• the more inbound links it has from pages with anchor text containing green tea;

• the higher it will appear on Google’s results for searches containing green tea and;

• the more visits it will get from those searching with keywords containing green tea.

Which is why In Anchor is a measure of the amount of real competition for a keyword niche. Wordtracker doesn’t display In Anchor but it uses it in the formula for KEI (see below).

IAAT (In Anchor And Title) IAAT (In Anchor And Title) is a count of the number of pages with the keyword in the anchor text of at least one inbound link (In Anchor) and in their Page Title Tag (In Title). We said above that anchor text is the single most important factor in SEO. Well, the Page Title Tag is the single most important factor on the page for SEO. The Page Title Tag appears at the top of your browser window when viewing a page (except on Google’s Chrome browser, for some annoying reason). See the text underlined in the image below:

So if a page has a keyword in the anchor text (In Anchor) of at least one inbound link And in its Page Title Tag (In Title) then we can reasonably say that (by design or by luck) it is well optimized for that keyword. Which is why IAAT is a measure of the amount of serious competition for a keyword niche.

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You can read about the unique source of Wordtracker’s competition data in Mike Mindel’s Finding profitable keywords just got easier with Wordtracker’s Keywords tool So if you sort your Wordtracker results by IAAT then you see those with the most competition at the top. For a new site, these are the keywords it will be hardest to get organic search engine traffic for:

Study these toughest of keywords. Wise warriors choose their battles so don’t go competing for these exact keywords without a good reason to think you can win. Note that organic green tea, a keyword I’ve already chosen to target, is high on that list above. So we’ve been warned and we’ll sort out that little problem later.

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Enough already – get to the party We could do lots more work here. We might investigate each keyword in more detail including: • Find the number of PPC adverts for each keyword to assess their commerciality.

• Finding the bid costs for PPC ads for these keywords.

• Researching the top 10 pages that rank for these keywords on Google, counting their inbound links, assessing the quality of their inbound links.

• Doing the same for the sites those pages are on.

• Finding out how those sites perform on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, etc.

All those ideas are great. And if you have time, do it – but do it to learn about your target markets and the competition. It’s more clues, more guesswork, and you should have enough for now. You have a range of at least 25 target niches and keywords that can be mapped to corresponding pages. You want these pages anyway – no matter how they eventually perform on search engines. But what you really want is results for real traffic for your site. You want verification of your target keywords from PPC and organic traffic. You want speed. You want to get to the party. There is an exception to this. It’s what I call the ‘niche hunters’. Online marketers looking for small niches to sell products they haven’t yet thought of. They will want to know more about the commercial potential of a keyword niche before investing in it.

Combining Popularity with Competition The Wordtracker Keywords tool offers two metrics that combine Popularity (Searches) with Competition metrics to give a single metric you can use to choose which keywords might be the best to invest in. Those ‘combination’ metrics are: Wordtracker.com




• KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index)

• KEI3 (Keyword Effectiveness Index 3)

They share the following two principles:

• KEI increases with Searches.

• KEI decreases with Competition.

So a very simple KEI might use the formula:

Searches / Google Count (no. of competing websites)

Eg, searches = 1,000; G Count = 1,000; KEI = 1,000 / 1,000 = 1.

But because allowance must be made for the increased value of larger search numbers, a third principle can be followed:

• The Searches value is factored up (squared in both cases).

Otherwise, if Searches and Competition both increase by the same amount then KEI would stay the same, which would ignore the increased potential of the larger number of searches. KEI factors up the searches number by squaring it KEI3 does do this at all which is odd. Google Count (the number of competing websites), whilst it was used for many years in KEI formulae, is considered to be too crude a measure of competition because it makes no allowance for the quality of that competition. KEI3 only considers serious competition because it uses IAAT (In Anchor And Title) to measure it. The KEI3 formula is:

KEI3 = Searches / IAAT

KEI3 is a superior metric to KEI when it works, ie, when you have a value for IAAT. This is crucial because a keyword with no IAAT pages in theory has no serious competition but would get a KEI3 score of zero (it should be infinity but I guess that won’t fit on the page ;-). So if a keyword has a high KEI3 value then it’s of great interest. But keywords with a zero KEI value are potentially even more interesting and we’ll have to identify them in other ways. KEI might find them ...

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KEI uses IA (In Anchor) as its competition metric and so will consider more keywords but be less accurate. KEI formula is:

KEI = Searches^2 / IA

If a keyword has a high KEI value then it too is of great interest. But again it won’t capture all interesting keywords – I don’t think any single metric will.

How to use the KEI metrics Because the KEI metrics identify some but not all interesting keywords, the way to use them is to consider keywords with high KEI values, but be aware that other keywords may be of interest too.

d) Assess Popularity/Competition ratios part 1 (KEI) Sort your list by KEI. See green tea example:

Those are the top five keywords in our green tea list ranked by KEI and I don’t like any of them. They aren’t appropriate for our shop, which is not doing the growth treatment thing (what is that?), the detox thing, the face cream thing or the slimming thing. We could create pages for words like these and hope we can sell green tea to those interested in green tea face cream. But you and I have better things to do.

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We can scroll down the list (there are 1,000 keywords on it) where we find the following have good KEI scores and are appropriate to our business:

green tea benefits herbal iced green tea umeboshi green tea

best tasting green tea bulk green loose tea

We add them to the green tea Target Keyword List. You might be thinking ‘what’s a good KEI score?’ There’s no precise answer but with Wordtracker data, I like KEI values over 10. In our example, best tasting green tea gatecrashed the target list with a KEI of just 2.56 because I liked the phrase.

e) Assess Popularity/Competition ratios part 2 (KEI3) Sort your List by KEI3. See green tea example below:

Above you can see the top 10 keywords in our green tea list ranked by KEI3. lipitor and green tea is an informational search as Lipitor is a statin drug and I doubt you can buy green tea laced with statin drugs – but perhaps we should pitch the idea to big pharma ;-) Despite not being commercial, I’m going to choose it as we could write some great content on the subject and perhaps get some inbound links containing green tea. Wordtracker.com




making iced green tea is informational too. But show someone how to make perfect iced tea and you might get them in the mood for buying, coming back for more, linking to your article or signing up for a newsletter that will send more recipes. Sounds good. The misspelling green tea benfits is of interest. I might accidentally misspell benefits on a page that targets green tea benefits ;-) There are over 1,000 keywords on this report and plenty more of interest but I have enough for now. I’ll save these three to the green tea Target Keywords List.

f) Review Target Keywords List Review your Target Keyword List. Eg, for green tea:

We wanted five but have nine. One (green tea benfits) is just there as a note and two are more link building ideas than SEO targets. So nine is fine. Each choice has its own reason for being chosen, as you know.

If the competition for a keyword looks too tough In our example, organic green tea needs some thought as the KEI figures are telling us we will struggle to get results. We might:

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• Drop the keyword. But what about all our organic green tea stock?

• Change the whole target market to organic green tea. A bit drastic and limiting.

• Create a new target market for organic green tea and then find some more winnable child keyword niches to target with new pages. Interesting.

• Replace organic green tea with a child of organic green tea and monitor results. That’s the one for us.

A quick search on Wordtracker with organic green tea and a repeat of the above process finds us bulk organic green tea. It hasn’t got good KEI figures or a lot of searches but it’s worth a go because:

• We’re going to test with PPC and we can really deliver on what’s being searched for (gotta get rid of that stock).

• It overlaps with bulk green loose tea which creates bulk as a theme, which is always good.

Yet more prioritizing If you need to prioritize these keyword niches because perhaps you just can’t build all these pages at once or something has to go first, then try this order of prioritization:

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• Keywords you already get results for (see Part Three of this book).

• Keywords containing other keywords you already get results for (also see Part Three of this book).

• Keywords related to products that you must sell. Like organic green tea above.

• High KEI keywords with no KEI3 (capturing keywords with no IAAT, ie, a KEI3 of infinity).

• High KEI3s.




Verify with Google data We can use the Google database for one last check before commissioning content and optimizing pages for pay per click tests. Here are the steps to take:

• Export ‘keywords only’ from your Target Keywords List.

• Copy the words and paste them back into Wordtracker as a new search.

• Add your negative keywords to the seed keywords list (you’ve saved them, right?)

• See if your target keywords appear in the results.

Alternatively, from the Target Keywords List you could click ‘search’ next to each word. If your target keywords appear in the Google results then you can confidently take them to the next stage of keyword research. If any of your keywords do not appear in the Google results, they still might be great keywords but you can’t be sure of that. If you have too many keywords, these might be the ones to leave behind.

Find all your target markets’ target keywords Now repeat that process above for your other target markets. If time and resources are tight then perhaps first do it for just five (or less). The most important thing is to keep moving – get to the party. For which you need a website. So let’s build a website …

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Part Two: Keyword Research Funnel | Step 3. Create first content

Keyword Research Funnel Step 3. Create first content Create pages on your site for each of your target keyword niches.

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Chapter 13: Plan your website We looked in chapter 11 at how you can use your keyword research to plan your website content and structure. It’s time to do that for real. Your target markets will each map to a category home page on your website. So this Target Markets List …

… maps to the five category home pages (of the 10) you can see in the image below. Each is linked to from the site home page …

Each of your target markets (= categories) has some child target keyword niches. Each of those is mapped to a page and those pages are linked to from their mother category pages as represented in this image on the following page:

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Part Two: Chapter 13 | Plan your website

In the image below, we zoom in on one category (that for green tea):

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Part Two: Chapter 13 | Plan your website

What does the home page target? Your site’s most important and most wanted target keyword niche maps to your site home page. That would be tea for our example. But within that niche you must find a child niche for which you have a chance of beating the competition and getting results. Eg, buy organic tea online. You can become more ambitious as your site becomes more established and powerful.

And the category home pages? This same principle applies to each of your category home pages. You may have chosen to target the market green tea but you don’t necessarily have to target green tea with its category home. Again, if it’s too competitive, find a child niche for which you have a chance of beating the competition. Eg, buy green tea online.

Next … In Part Three we’ll see how analysis of real traffic shows you which keyword niches bring the most visits, response and sales. You can then focus your efforts on those niches – building more pages to target more phrases (I mean keyword niches but it doesn’t rhyme). But before you get there you need to build these pages (or optimize existing pages) and do some pay per click (PPC) advertising to find out which keyword niches you can get some response from.

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Chapter 14: Build your site cautiously It’s time to build your site. But build with caution by spending little time on search engine optimization (SEO). At this stage, optimizing your page for response is of more interest. Let me explain … It’s easy to forget that your keyword research so far is just market research. Very clever market research but it is based on sample databases of real searches, not all searches. The estimates of how hard the competition will be to beat are estimates of averages. They take no account of your own site’s position or the level of your resources and ability. You must now move cautiously from smart guesses based on sample data of others’ sites to reliable extrapolations based on real data from your site. If you are working on a site that’s already built the principles are the same. You are just working on pages that exist rather than pages you need to create. Remember you have no real data for your site, your marketing and your products. So don’t yet spend a lot of resources on your SEO. Crucially, make sure your systems for content creation and editing are flexible and fast. I’m regularly asked by clients to work on the details of specific pages – copy, pictures, SEO – but the first thing I always say is:

“Your website content management system (CMS) is more important than your site content because you will want to change your content for SEO and for marketing. SEO priorities will change and opportunities will emerge.

You must have the ability to add and edit every part of your pages, including home page, category pages, menus, menu text and marketing quickly and easily. If you can’t then you need a new website content management system (CMS).

If you don’t have such a CMS then brace yourself to watch opportunities pass and your site management and development costs be unnecessarily high.

I’ve yet to see an exception to this”.

Your priority target keywords will likely change once you have real response to measure. But you have to get to market before that can happen. So let’s build a site – as cautiously as we can. Let’s get to the party. Wordtracker.com



Part Two: Chapter 14 | Build your site cautiously

But only build pages you have to build, and pages you will want anyway.

We’ve only just begun Keyword research often stops here but we’ve only just begun. The serious work is coming up, starting with verifying and updating your keyword research with real traffic and response. We’ll get this in two ways:

• PPC traffic that will give you real response rates for your target keywords.

• Organic search engine traffic that will confirm PPC response rates and tell us which keywords we can really beat the competition for.

To PPC …

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Part Two: Keyword Research Funnel | Step 4. PPC to verify target keywords

Keyword Research Funnel Step 4. PPC to verify target keywords Use pay per click (PPC) advertising to discover if those searching with your target keywords will respond on your website. You are verifying your keyword research with real paid-for searches.

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Chapter 15: Verify keyword targets with PPC Now you must start verifying your keyword research. First, use PPC as it may take you a while to get organic (non-paid) traffic to come from search engines. You’ve found target markets and then target keyword niches within those markets. You then built a page for each target keyword niche. With PPC traffic you can find out in hours if your chosen target keywords were wise decisions. The principle and process is simple:

• Pay for some visitors who have searched with the keywords you’re targeting.

• If those visitors don’t respond, choose new target keywords.

• If those visitors do respond, start to invest in some SEO for your target keywords.

We’ll go through some pointers to help you with your PPC below. But this is not a PPC book and I strongly recommend you buy Ian Howie’s Wordtracker Masterclass: Google AdWords PPC Advertising. You can also read lots of free PPC advice from Ian and others on the Wordtracker Academy, including a free sample of his book – but seriously, go straight to the full book. It costs $49 and will save you fortune because if you get your PPC wrong it can cost you a lot of money. You have been warned. Using Ian Howie’s advice, here are those pointers: • Create a separate ad group for each of your target keywords. So if you have chosen five priority target markets with five target keyword niches each, then that’s 25 ad groups. • For each ad group, find as many negative keywords as you can before you make your campaign live. • You’ve created a page for each of your target keywords. Use those pages as the landing page for each matching ad group. The landing page is the page a user will be sent to (land on) if they click on your ad. • Make sure there is a clear and obvious response mechanism on each landing page. Don’t hide it.

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Part Two: Chapter 15 | Verify keyword targets with PPC

• Consider making that response mechanism some kind of ‘free gift’ that allows you to build a mailing list. Eg, a free white paper or a free ebook. However, this might not be suitable to your site. • Consider adding a telephone number and invite calls. Only display your ads when someone will answer and record the source of the calls (a unique number will help). • Test phrase and broad match bids but do so with a limited budget to make sure you don’t get burned and lose lots of money. • Add as many negative keywords as you can find to each ad group. Negative keywords are words you don’t want your adverts to appear for. Eg, you might sell tea and bid for the keyword tea. With a broad match bid your ad will appear for a search with tea tree oil. But you don’t sell tea tree oil! Add tree or oil as negative keywords and your ad will not appear for any searches containing them. • Watch out for broad match bids as they come with a sting in the tail. Not only will Google match your bid keyword with other keywords that contain it, eg, coffee with coffee pot but it will also match it with supposedly related keywords, eg hot beverage and perhaps even tea. Those examples are made up but they make the point. • If you sell to specific geographic regions, eg, towns, cities or countries, then restrict your ads to them. Go about your PPC wisely (you’ve bought Ian’s book already haven’t you?) and you might turn a profit straight away. But our main goal here is research. The first and most obvious thing to do is dump keywords that don’t deliver response. But before you dump a keyword: • Make sure you have at least 200 visits to your landing page from searches that contain it. 200 visits are enough visits to be sure your response rates are not just a bad (or good) run of luck. • Check marketing. Could it be improved? Are your products right? Also look out for new keywords that deliver good response rates. If you find any: • Add them to your target keywords. • Build a page for them quickly.

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Part Two: Chapter 15 | Verify keyword targets with PPC

• Pursue your PPC research and create new ad groups for them. Your remaining target keywords are now proven to deliver response. So if your SEO can bring traffic for them, response and sales will follow. So let’s find out if your SEO can bring traffic and, more importantly, which keyword niches you can most easily get traffic with, ie, beat the competition for. So let’s a do a little SEO. If I may stretch the ‘get to the party’ metaphor then with our PPC we have arrived. But we’ve paid to get in and have a sneak preview. If things go well there is fun to be had. We’re now going to find out the quickest and easiest way to have the most fun. You can finish the metaphor yourself with your own idea of what having fun at a party is.

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Part Two: Keyword Research Funnel | Step 5. SEO for verified keywords

Keyword Research Funnel Step 5. SEO for verified keywords Invest with search engine optimization (SEO) to achieve organic (non-paid) search engine traffic in the keyword niches PPC has proven will deliver response.

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Chapter 16: SEO for target keywords verified by PPC Time to roll out some real SEO. You found some target keyword niches with great potential, built some pages and tested them with PPC. Your PPC has told you which of those target keyword niches deliver response. This is outstanding but you still don’t know if your site can beat the competition and get organic search results for these keyword niches. Let’s find out with some search engine optimization (SEO). Here’s a summary of what to do …

• Optimize individual pages for their target keyword niches.

• Optimize the home page so it supports the keyword niches the rest of the site targets.

• Start some link building.

Let’s go into a little detail …

Optimize individual pages for their target keyword niches Use the keyword in the page title tag, description tag, headline, first paragraph and a little in your body copy text. Importantly, go out of your way not to overuse the exact target keywords. But do use plurals, singular, synonyms and similar-meaning words and phrases. The more natural your copy can be the better. So a good technique is to search a keyword research tool like Wordtracker Keywords or SEO blogger, look at the results, hide the tool and then write. Link out to quality resources on other sites and your own. Use the page’s target keywords as link text. For more detail, see How to optimize a page for 10,000 keywords.

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Part Two: Chapter 16 | SEO for target keywords verified by PPC

Optimize the home page so it supports the keyword niches the rest of the site targets Your home page should first be optimized for the keyword niche it’s targeting. Then you need to carefully link from your home page to your most important target keyword niches’ pages. This is worth a little explanation ... Inbound links from other sites are the most important thing determining which pages get to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs). For this reason we say that links bring ‘link power’ or ‘link juice’. Your site receives its link power via links from other sites and most of those links will likely go to your home page. That makes your home page your most powerful page and it shares its link power with the pages it, in turn, links to. Which is why you carefully link from your home page to your most important target keyword niches’ pages. Do so using their target keywords and the links will be even more powerful. You might, for example, set up some subheadings or small boxes for each target page and add short paragraphs of copy containing the desired links. If you must, just add a box with a list of links and call it something like ‘Featured pages’, ‘Most popular product’ or ‘Hotels in popular destinations’ like TripAdvisor do. See the below image of some TripAdvisor home page links:

For more detail on using internal links and the power of the home page to support your most targeted keyword niches’ pages, see Are your Superman pages trapped in a basement of kryptonite?

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Start some link building Quality inbound links from other sites to your own are essential for search engine optimization for all but the least competitive keywords. It’s easy for a number of different pages’ on-page SEO to be similar, which is why inbound links have become the determining factor for deciding who gets to the top. The more competitive a keyword is, the more consideration Google will give to inbound links. Put another way, the more results you want, the more quality link building you’ll have to do. It’s also why link building techniques and skills have become the most prized in SEO. And relevant quality links are now so important that people pay thousands of dollars for them, even though Google disapproves of paid-for links and will discount their value if it knows about them. Ideally, your inbound links will have both quality and relevance. Relevant links are those from sites or pages with related content and (ideally) with link text related to your targeted keywords. Quality links are unique text links inside body copy, preferably on sites and pages that search engines can trust, eg, old sites with a history of their own quality inbound links. Link building has two main stages (content creation and promotion): Stage 1: Create content others will want to link to (link-worthy content), including:

• Quality, useful or amusing articles, stories, news, blogs, videos or pictures

• Free reports or ‘white papers’

• Useful widgets

Stage 2: Promote that content using methods such as:

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• Press releases

• Your own newsletters

• Personal contacts including other sites in your target markets’ online market places




• Article publishing sites.

• Social bookmarking and networking sites.

Wordtracker’s new Link Builder tool will help you find link prospects – sites you might get links from. You’ll also find more details on link building in 62 steps to the definitive link building campaign and Wordtracker Masterclass: Link Building – How to build links to your website for SEO, traffic and response.

Now wait With your SEO underway, you now wait for results. When your site starts to get nonpaid organic visits from search engines, you can move to the Keyword Research Circle of Response which is explained in Part Three …

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Part Three: Keyword Research Circle of Response | With consistent organic traffic move…

Keyword Research Funnel With consistent organic traffic move to the Keyword Research Circle of Response When your site has consistent organic (non-paid) search engine traffic, you can move to the Keyword Research Circle of Response which we explore in Part Three.

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Part Three

Keyword research for sites with traffic


Introduction

The Keyword Research Circle of Response Exploit your proven most-profitable keyword niches When your site has consistent organic (non-paid) search engine traffic you can enter the Keyword Research Circle of Response, which we’ll look at in detail in this last part of the book. The Circle of Response is a virtuous circular process based on the principle of exploiting the keyword niches proven to be the most profitable on your site. It has the following four major stages:

A) Find new priority target keyword niches Target your site’s most responsive keyword niches from organic (non-paid) visits. These are found simply with Wordtracker Strategizer (or manually, if you prefer).

B) Find new keyword niches within target niches Dig into your target keyword niches to find new sub-niches to target.

C) Invest in new target keyword niches Optimize new (or existing) content that targets your new target keyword niches.

D) For max ROI use marginal response and profit To maximize your return on investment (ROI), convert response into profit and use marginal response rates to reassess your target keyword niches. Which takes you back around the virtuous Circle of Response. Wordtracker.com



Part Three: Introduction | Keyword research for sites with traffic

Let’s summarize each of those four stages before we look at them in detail ...

A) Find new priority target keyword niches Following the Keyword Research Funnel, you chose target markets and then target keyword niches within those markets. PPC advertising was used to find which of those keyword niches could bring response to your site. You then optimized for your responsive niches with on-page SEO and link building. Organic search engine traffic followed. You now analyze that traffic to find new prioritized target keyword niches. Your site has now proven it can get response from people searching with keywords in these new target niches and beat enough of the competing websites to get traffic. You’ve found success, no matter how small – now build on it.

B) Find new keyword niches within target niches Dig into each of your new prioritized target keyword niches to find child niches. Your subsequent SEO and PPC work will depend on keyword niche size and your level of resources. You might optimize one or two existing pages or create hundreds of new pages.

C) Invest in new target keyword niches It’s time for action – SEO and PPC. For SEO, each of your target keyword niches is mapped to an existing or new page. Page content is optimized. Internal links are optimized. Off-site link building campaigns begin. Used with more detailed PPC advice, the processes given here can kickstart a PPC campaign by directing it at keyword niches proven to bring response to your site.

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Part Three: Introduction | Keyword research for sites with traffic

D) For max ROI use marginal response and profit To achieve maximum return on investment, you must know the relationship between your response metrics and your profit. Also, you must continually monitor response trends after your SEO work has started. Response rates for your target keyword niches may drop, changing their order of priority. Plus, new highly responsive keyword niches will always emerge. This continual monitoring of response trends and the emergence of new keyword niches to target takes you back round the Circle of Response. All the time, you must balance long-term investments in larger keyword niches with the immediate potential offered by smaller keyword niches that might bring response today.

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Part Three: Keyword Research Circle of Response | A. Find new priority target keyword niches

Keyword Research Circle of Response A. Find new priority target keyword niches Target your site’s most responsive keyword niches from organic (non-paid) visits. These are found simply with Wordtracker Strategizer (or manually, if you prefer).

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Chapter 17: Find new target keyword niches Once your site has organic (non-paid) visits from search engines you can use the principles of building on success and targeting keyword niches to successfully work at the scale required to maximize profit. We explored these principles in Part One of this book so let’s get straight to some specific step-by-step procedures. Your site will need to be set up for a Google Analytics account. You’ll need a subscription to Wordtracker Strategizer which was built for this job. If you’re not sure about this then don’t worry as (at time of writing) a one-month trial only costs one dollar. But I think you’ll like it. If you don’t want to try out Strategizer then follow the manual method outlined in chapter 7 (How to manually convert your Google Analytics keyword reports into keyword niche reports) to get Strat-like reports. Configure your Google Analytics account to monitor your chosen measures of response, as discussed in chapter 6 (Response response response). Create a report on Strategizer for the most recent month or longer (try 12 months if you need to cover seasonal times). Configure your report for the region and language you sell to. Eg, English and All Countries and Territories. See image below showing the Wordtracker Strategizer report configuration page on the following page:

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Part Three: Chapter 17 | Find new target keyword niches

Strategizer reports on your site’s top 2,000 keyword niches. Your reports will by default be sorted by Visits – the number of visits to your site searching with keywords from each listed keyword niche. See the Visits column in the image on the following page (highlighted in blue because it is the ‘sorted’ column):

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Visits are interesting but response makes money so sort your report by your chosen response metric. In Wordtracker Srategizer there are two obvious options:

• Ecommerce Conversion Rate (Ecommerce CR) or Per Visit Value if you are selling products directly from your site and you have the Google Analytics ecommerce module configured.

• Goal Conversion Rate (Goal CR) which combines up to four separately configured Goals.

The site we are using as an example has Goals configured to monitor sign-ups to a free newsletter. Those sign-ups are sales leads because the free newsletter, as well as giving lots of useful information, is used to sell a paid-for newsletter. The image on the following page shows the same report sorted by Goal Conversion Rate (Goal CR):

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Those are some mighty conversion rates at the top of that list (we can only see the top 10 in this image). The what is business management? keyword niche is converting at 48%, ie, almost one out of every two visitors that visits the site with a search containing what is business management? goes on to convert. And the Niche Size column is showing Google estimates almost 10,000 (9,900) searches are made each month (more accurately last month) with keywords in this niche. And the Market Share column says there is lots of potential to get more visits from this niche. Strategizer’s Opportunity graphs show you Google’s estimates of a Niche Size alongside your site’s Visits – the difference is your Opportunity for more Visits. And the Google Insights button will give you the option of seeing an embedded Google Insights graph on the page. See images on the following page:

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But there are only seven visits from the what is business management? keyword niche and that’s not enough to confidently forecast continued response at similar rates. To be strongly confident of extrapolations from response rates for a keyword niche you want 200 visits for the report period. If you’re feeling lucky, use less. You can use the report filter to only show keyword niches of a certain size. Eg, below it’s being configured to show only keyword niches with more than 80 visits:

You can see the top 10 results in the report below (I’ve checked five of them – highlighted in green – so they are used in the graphs):

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Notice how some of those keyword niches have No Data in the Niche Size column? That means Google doesn’t have enough data (in the sample database it uses) to estimate how many searches are made. We might ignore that (and I often do) but let’s first filter the report to show only keyword niches that Google estimates to have at least 100 searches a month. Here’s the filter configuration:

And on the next page are the resulting top 15 keyword niches when sorted by Goal Conversion.

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The image below shows the same report after some keyword niches have been saved as Targets. This is easily done by checking the box on the left and then clicking ‘Save as Target’.

These will be this site’s first targets because they deliver the most response. If this is your site, you now target these keyword niches with SEO, starting at the top (the most responsive). You can be confident of: • The best response rates your site can currently get. • Getting more visits in three ways (see chapter 7 for details):

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1. The same exact keywords – ranking higher on Google for the same keywords that already bring visits and response.

2. Down the long tail – ranking on Google for new keywords in those niches.

3. Up the long tail – ranking on Google for bigger niches that your targets are themselves part of.

• Beating the competition because you already are (I love this bit). There is no longer any need to look at any competition metrics (and wasn’t that a tedious job?). • How much investment each keyword niche deserves because you know:

• How big they each are (courtesy of Google’s estimates).

• How many of those searches already reach your site (see Market Share).

Some long-term keyword and SEO strategy The process shown so far in this chapter cares little for keyword niche size. If a keyword niche is small then do a small amount of work. But it is also wise to have a long-term strategy that targets big markets. This planning is easily done with Strategizer … Use the filter to configure a Strategizer report to show only: • Keyword niches that respond at above-average rates. • Keyword niches with a Size estimate from Google of over 10,000. Here’s how the filter looks for that:

And on the following page is the resulting report for our example site which has been sorted by Google’s Niche Size estimate so that the largest possible target niches appear at the top:

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Above I’ve checked the keyword niches I’m interested in for long-term investment (as well as those already Targets). Those in green have not yet been made ‘targets’ (but they soon will be). Business development looks like a beauty. The site already gets nearly 2,000 visits a month from this keyword niche and with over 300 different keywords. And it’s a big niche with 1.8 million searches a month. That’s worth a ‘wow’. The business development management niche is part of (a sub niche or child of) business development. Not only is it, on its own, quite substantial in size – with Google estimating over 49,000 visits a month – but our example site converts those searchers at over 8%. Very tasty. Further down the page we see another sub niche of business development with a very high response rate – business development strategy with a conversion rate of over 7%. The turnaround and management of business niches also look rewarding although they clearly aren’t as big as business development. Business development dwarfs the others in size and conversion rates but a wise investment strategy spreads risk. So if I have the resources, I will target the business development, turnaround and management of business niches. With target keyword niches chosen for short and long-term strategies, next we’ll do a little digging into those niches ...

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Part Three: Keyword Research Circle of Response | B. Invest in new target keyword niches

Keyword Research Circle of Response B. Find new keyword niches within target niches Dig into your target keyword niches to find new sub-niches to target.

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Chapter 18: Find keyword niches within target niches

So Wordtracker Strategizer has given you a list of target keyword niches for your SEO and PPC. Before creating a page for each target, it’s worth digging into the niche to find child keyword niches. There may be thousands and some might be worth their own pages. You might find 10, 20, 100 or more interesting child keyword niches – each of which can have its own page on your site. What’s possible depends on the niche size and its nature. How much you do depends on the resources you have available. Let’s take the example of business development from our business website.

Our job is now to exploit this keyword niche, ie, the long tail of keywords containing, and similar to, business development. More keyword research gives these two options: A. Keywords you already get results from – A-list keywords. Eg, the 313 keyword niches in the business development keyword niche (we might say sub-niches or childniches) that the site currently gets results for (see ‘313’ in the Keywords column in the image above). B. New keywords from keyword research tools – B-list keywords. For example, using Wordtracker Keywords. Of course, we’ll need to be able to prioritize any interesting new keyword niches we find. If we pursue B-list keywords we can prioritize using keyword tool estimates of Popularity and about the Competition. In other words we’ll be back in the guesswork of the Keyword Research Funnel. Which is great when you have nothing better but we do have something better. By first pursuing your A-list keywords you can prioritize the offered sub-niches according to your own site’s real response rates. Here’s how ... Using our example, we’ll find business development A-list keywords on Wordtracker Strategizer in three ways:

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Part Three: Chapter 18 | Find keyword niches within target niches

A1. Click ‘Keywords In Niche’ Strategizer Check a keyword niche on a Strategizer report and then click ‘Keywords In Niche’ to see all the keywords in that niche that bring visits to your site. The image below shows the first seven of 313 business development keywords bringing visits to our example site:

This is single (exact) keyword data we can see below the keyword niche row. Some interesting keywords stand out immediately. Pages should be made to target business development strategy/ies and business development management as both get very high response rates and Google estimates they have good size niches.

A2. Filter your Strategizer report You can filter your Strategizer report to show only keyword niches containing business development. See image:

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The above report is sorted by Goal Conversion Rate. The top four have fantastic response rates but no visits estimated by Google and a small number of visits. Although we might try our luck targeting them we can see other keyword niches with more visits (making their response rates more reliable) and larger Niche Sizes (meaning they have more potential).

A3. Create an Advanced segment on Google Analytics The Strategizer report only looked at the website’s top 2,000 keyword niches. You can often find many more by creating a new Strategizer report containing only keywords in the target keyword niche … On Google Analytics, create an Advanced Segment showing visits from searches with keywords containing business development. See image below of this advanced segment being created:

Now make a Strategizer report that only imports data from that Advanced Segment. See image on the following page of such a report being configured:

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The above three techniques should be the first way you find specific keyword niches to target and create pages. It is your A-list. The simple reason for this is that you know they deliver response to your site. You should now invest in your A-list keywords with SEO and PPC as outlined in the next chapter. After optimizing for your A-list sub-niches, you may have resources left and be hungry to exploit this niche some more. And of course it might be that your A-list didn’t contain very much. If so, hit the B-list …

B1. Use Wordtracker Keywords to find new keyword niches Go to the Wordtracker Keywords tool and make a search with the niche’s seed keyword, eg, business development. And look at what we get in the report in the following image. There are hundreds of large keyword niches – many for which we can be very confident of both achieving visits and high response rates.

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Use your judgement to remove keyword niches that are irrelevant to your site. Prioritize the remainder based on your judgement of their appropriateness. Then invest in those keyword niches with your SEO and PPC.

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Part Three: Keyword Research Circle of Response | C. Invest in new target keyword niches

Keyword Research Circle of Response C. Invest in new target keyword niches Create and optimize new (or existing) content for your new target keyword niches.

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Chapter 19: Invest in your new target keyword niches

It’s time for some SEO and PPC on those target keyword niches. Let’s go to work. This is a keyword research book and won’t give you all you need to know about SEO and PPC. But we are going to help you on your way and give you links to more detailed resources. SEO first …

SEO We looked at SEO in chapter 16 for the Keyword Research Funnel. But it’s worth going through it again now we are in the Circle of Response and the approach is different because we know we will get more response. Work from the top of your list of prioritized target keyword niches. Let’s use business development as our example target keyword niche again: • Find the best performing page for business development (the top business development page). • If this is not the home page, add some content about business development to your home page and link from that content to your top business development page. This link will pass ‘link power’ from your home page to your target’s page. (Your home page usually has the most inbound links from other sites. Inbound links bring ‘link power’ which is required for search engine success. And if your home page links to your target pages it will pass on some of its power.) • Link to your top business development page from other pages on your site. • Use business development as the link text for all the links mentioned here. • Ideally make those links from within unique paragraphs of text. This takes time and you may only have the resources to use unique text on some pages. On others you can add menu links or lists. • Check your target niche’s A-list of sub-niches, ie, niches within the business development niche that you already get results for – see chapter 18. On your top business development page, write about some business development subjects on the A-list. When those subjects are mentioned, use the words to link to new or existing pages that are, in turn, optimized.

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Part Three: Chapter 19 | Invest in your new target keyword niches

For more detailed and advanced help with link building, I recommend the following resources: • Wordtracker Masterclass: Link Building - How to Build Links to Your Website for SEO, Traffic and Response • 62 steps to the definitive link building campaign • Are your Superman Pages trapped in a basement full of kryptonite? • Link building for search engine optimization The amount of work you do for each target keyword niche depends on the estimated size of each niche:

• For small niches (estimated Niche Size is less than 1,000/mth), optimize one page (including the addition of more relevant text) and improve your site’s internal linking to that page (as described above).

• For medium-sized niches (estimated Niche Size 1,000 - 1,000,000/ mth), optimize a number of existing or new pages with a category home page. Build inbound links from other sites to that page.

• For large niches (size is greater than 1,000,000/mth) create/use a number of categories and treat each like a medium-sized niche.

PPC With PPC and Google AdWords you bid for the keywords you want your adverts to appear for when they are searched with on Google. Eg, if your site sells books and newsletters about managing businesses (like our example site) then you might want your ad to appear for a search with business strategy. But your bids must have a ‘match type’ which determines precisely what keywords your ads will appear for. There are three main keyword match types:

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• Exact match bid: With an Exact match bid for business strategy your ad will appear for the exact search business strategy and no other search.

• Phrase match bid: With a Phrase match bid for business strategy your ad will appear for searches containing the words business strategy in that




order, eg, business strategy development but not business management strategy.

• Broad match bid: With a Broad match bid for business strategy your ad will appear for searches containing the words business plus strategy in any order, eg, business strategy development and business management strategy.

Phrase and Broad match bids are incredibly powerful because they allow a single bid to reach a keyword’s long tail, ie, all other keywords containing the bid keyword. Eg, all keywords containing business strategy. And most keywords’ long tails are very very long. The concept of the Broad match is similar to a keyword niche. Phrase and Broad match bids are powerful but they are also problematic because most keywords’ long tails – and therefore most Phrase and Broad match bids – will include many keywords of no interest to you. Unchecked Phrase and Broad match bids are a great way to lose your money quickly by bidding on irrelevant keywords and paying for unwanted clicks. But Phrase and Broad match bids can be controlled with Negative bids. Bids for different keywords are grouped into Ad groups. Ad groups can include Negative keywords – keywords that you don’t want your ads to appear for. Eg, that businesss management website might want its advert to appear for searches containing business strategy but not business strategy jobs. This can be done by making business strategy job and business strategy jobs Negative keywords. Choosing which keywords to bid on and what match types to use is a detailed craft that requires balancing the following:

• Finding your most profitable keywords.

• Making Exact match bids on those keywords.

• Making lower (fewer $ per click) Phrase and Broad match bids on the same keywords but controlling them with Negative keywords.

Strategizer converts your Google Analytics non-paid keyword reports into keyword niche reports. This gives you a ‘broad match’ view of your site’s performance for different keywords.

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So instead of getting an idea about how your site might perform on PPC for an Exact match bid for business strategy (which Google Analytics will give), you get an idea of how it might perform with a Broad match bid.

Build a bid stack (Exact, Phrase and Broad match bids on the same keywords) Build a bid stack for the seed keyword of each keyword niche delivering a high response rate. A bid stack includes Exact, Phrase and Broad match bids on the same keywords. However, the Phrase and Broad match bids must have accompanying Negative keywords. Here’s how to get them for each target keyword …

Finding Negative keywords with Strategizer In Strategizer, filter a report for a long period to show only keyword niches containing your target keyword. Then sort results by your response metric (with the lowest values at the top). Eg, if my target keyword is management skills then I filter results like this:

The above report was made to help find Negative keywords for a PPC bid for the keyword management skills.

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The keyword niches selected and highlighted in green are sub-niches of management skills and are delivering 0% or less than 1% response so we don’t want our ads to appear for them. Instead, we’ll use them as Phrase match Negative keywords with our Phrase and Broad match bids. This will make sure our ads do not appear for any searches containing those phrases.

Negative keywords from Analytics, AdWords and the Wordtracker Keywords tool Strategizer will find you some of your most reliable Negative keywords (you can see they aren’t converting) but don’t rely on it alone. Here are four other ways to find Negative keywords:

• Google Analytics: enter your seed word into the keyword filter on the nonpaid keyword report and look for keywords that don’t convert.

• Wordtracker: enter your keywords into Wordtracker’s Related keywords tool and use your intuition and common sense.

• AdWords tools: AdWords itself will suggest keywords that you can consider to be Negative keywords.

• AdWords Google Search Query Tool: when your AdWords campaigns start you should immediately look at your results on the Google Search Query Tool. If keywords are responding badly, consider adding them as Negative keywords.

How much work should a keyword niche get Strategizer shows you Google’s estimates of the size of each of your target keyword niches. The larger a keyword niche, the more potential it offers for rewards and losses from PPC. So the bigger a keyword niche, the more effort you should put in to finding Negative keywords and further refining your ad groups with Exact match bids or new ad groups for sub-niches (like business management skills above is a sub-niche of management skills).

Money saving tip If it’s too expensive to bid for an Exact match on your target keyword niche’s keyword – that’s management skills in our example above – make it an Exact match Negative

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keyword. That way your Phrase and Broad match bids can still compete for less expensive keywords.

Use this PPC advice with more wide-ranging help Successful AdWords and PPC requires a broad range of skills and as much experience as possible. Strategizer can give you a great start but you must use it, and the advice here, with other resources. This is not a PPC book but Ian Howie’s AdWords Masterclass is – and I highly recommend it, along with his AdWords articles.

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Part Three: Keyword Research Circle of Response | D. For maximum ROI use marginal response and profit

Keyword Research Circle of Response D. For max ROI use marginal response & profit Convert response into profit and use marginal response rates to choose your target keyword niches. Which takes you back to A (for this is a virtuous circle).

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Chapter 20: Maximize return on investment (ROI)

Once work starts on targeting your most responsive keyword niches you need to carefully monitor results if you are to maintain your pursuit of a maximum return on investment.

Monitor Trends in site visits and response You can save keyword niches as Targets in Strategizer and track their progress over time. See site Visits Trends graph for five target keyword niches below:

Your trend graphs can be for any of the metrics Strategizer tracks. The graph above is Visits and the one below shows Goal Conversion Rate (Goal CR):

See Google Insights’ graphs of seasonal trends and regional variations With one click, you can see Google Insights graphs of your Targets. This will show you seasonal and regional trends for your target keyword niches. See image:

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Part Three: Chapter 20 | Maximize return on investment (ROI)

Monitor Opportunity You can also see bar graphs illustrating your site’s visits from a niche alongside Google’s estimate of its size. The difference is your Opportunity. See image:

See Site Visits, Response, Google Insights and Opportunities in one view You can see all the above graphs in one view like this:

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Monitor marginal response rates You chose your targets based on historical response rates. But things might change. When you start investing and doing more work your response rates might start to drop. And those for other keyword niches might rise. This might be the law of diminishing returns or changes in fashion, tastes, seasons, the effectiveness of your marketing and the competition’s effectiveness. Whatever the cause, you need to reassess your keyword strategy – your target keyword niches. For this reason, it’s wise to monitor your marginal response rates. This can be defined in different ways but we shall call it the rate of response you get after you have invested. Example … • With Strategizer, response rates were studied for 12 months from Jan-Dec 2009. 25 different keyword niches were chosen to target. • Work started in Jan 2010. • Marginal response rates are those from Jan 2010 and onwards. Let’s look at some reports for that example … First we see 12 months of reporting for five target keyword niches …

For this case study, work has started and we want to see marginal response rates. We can see this in the Trends graph below with the figures from January 2010.

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With reports like these you can make sure you continue to target your most profitable keyword niches.

Cross reference with Google Insights You can compare your target keyword niches’ marginal trends in visits with those estimated by Google Insights. For example, you might get increased response for the target keyword niche barbecues but was this due to your site’s performance or did a change in the weather make more people want to buy and research barbecues? You can find out by comparing your site’s trends with those shown by Google Insights.

Long-term investment can’t change with the wind A serious site needs a long-term strategy and an accompanying long-term investment. This will mean targeting larger keyword niches by building more pages with SEO and link building. You can’t change such plans quickly because of a short-term change in response rates. So you need have confidence in the basis of your long-term strategy. Here’s how … Be sure any keyword niches you make significant investments in:

• Bring at least 200 visits to your site in one month.

• Have brought at least 200 responses in the last 12 months (if your responses include specific actions that can be tracked like sales, downloads or sign-ups).

This doesn’t mean you don’t invest in other keyword niches. It just means you do so cautiously.

Short-term investment can change with the wind If you monitor your site’s best-performing keyword niches from week-to-week or even day-to-day you will see some new keyword niches start to perform well. If you can, take immediate action to chase these for more response. You might:

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• Optimize the existing pages that perform well for the niches.

• Link to those pages from the home page.

• Build new pages that target child keyword niches.

• Do some quick link building.

Response is not profit Never forget that response is not profit. You need to know the relationship between your response metrics and your profit. If you measure sign-ups to a newsletter, what’s the lifetime value of each email on your list? If you make a sale you have a new customer. What’s the lifetime value of a new customer? How many times will they buy in a year? What’s the average value of a sale? How many customers might they bring by word of mouth? Crucially … What are your margins on sales? For most sales, the revenue is a long way from the profit figure.

Keyword research and SEO never stops If you’ve followed this book’s recommendations then you’ve gone once around the Keyword Research Circle of Response. Now you should do it again and again, balancing long-term investments into large niches with short-term actions for immediate results, always looking for the highest response and profit. You will always find new profitable keyword niches emerging in your Strategizer reports so keep digging for gold. The path to profit with SEO and PPC is not always smooth. There will be ups, downs and plateaux when nothing seems to change for months. But if you follow this process then it will guide you through to the success you’ll deserve.

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The Wordtracker Academy Free articles, case studies, tips and tricks to help you grow your online business through effective keyword research, pay per click advertising and search engine optimization (SEO). Gain a clear advantage over your competitors by becoming an expert at Google AdWords, SEO and keyword research. We’ve commissioned some of the world’s best online marketing and SEO professionals to be your guides. Go to the Wordtracker Academy

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Customer service contacts Use our support system Email a message to [email protected] Chat live with one of our support team at Or call us: • From the USA and Canada: 011 44 333 200 4555 • From the UK: 0333 200 4555 (calls are charged at local rates) • From any other country: +44 333 200 4555

Publication details Written by Mark Nunney Design/production: Shilpa Patel Sub-editors: Jerome Smail, Julie McNamee Thanks to: Mal Darwen, Justin Deaville, Ken McGaffin, Nina Stibbe Produced and published in July 2010 Wordtracker LLP Unit 11-12 Apollo Studios, Charlton Kings Road, London NW5 2SB United Kingdom ISBN number: 978-0-9561475-6-1 © Mark Nunney CEO: Mike Mindel Chief marketing officer: Ken McGaffin

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Keyword Research

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