Getting to Grips with Google – Part II – Keyword Analysis
Choosing the right keywords and key phrases is one of the most important steps of any SEO and website promotion strategy.
It’s all well and good ranking number 1 for phrases such as “new and used vintage wine racks” but if no one is searching for that term, then your efforts will be fruitless.
By doing a keyword analysis, we can look at what keywords & keyphrases are being searched for the most, and also then we can check to see what the competition is like for those terms, and if we think we can stand a chance for ranking well for them.
First off, let’s suppose your online business is one that sells rattan garden furniture. Obviously we’ll be optimizing for the term “rattan furniture,” but should this be our only target? Let’s have a look.
Head on over to the Google Keyword Tool and let’s type “rattan furniture” into the box. Give it a few seconds and a long list of search terms will appear in order of relevance.
I would suggest scrolling down the list and clicking the link to download the file as a .csv file. This way we can open in Excel or any other spreadsheet program and sort our columns in descending order and remove any information we don’t need.
Further down the list we can see that there is a section headed “Additional keywords to be considered”, so let’s download this .csv file too.
When we open the file, we’ll sort these in order of Local Search Volume, because if you’re selling rattan furniture, chances are you’re selling to a local market in your chosen country.
We see our chosen term of “rattan furniture” as the top of the list, shortly followed by “rattan outdoor furniture” and “rattan garden furniture”. As you can see, these terms are really the only ones with significant search volumes.
We can do the same with the second spreadsheet we downloaded, which contains additional related searches.
By repeating the process we see “furniture”, “garden furniture” and “living room furniture” as our top searches. The top two are relevant to us, but the third isn’t quite in our niche.
But if we look down further we can see the phrases “patio furniture” and “conservatory furniture” that have very good local search volumes and relate nicely to what we’re selling.
Now we can search for these terms in Google and assess our competition.
Before we do this, we are going to install the SEOQuake toolbar into our browser. This will give us some crucial information about the sites we’re up against.
Once installed, now when we do a search for “rattan furniture,” and open the first few links, we will see the SEO information in the SEOQuake toolbar at the top of the page.
Our top hit in this particular instance is a company called Cane Direct. SEOQuake tells us it only has a page rank of 2, which is easily achievable in as little as a month so.
For a term with such high volume, this is not that competitive so it won’t be too difficult to get us on the first page for this and related searches.
Repeat this process for the other search terms in our list. If you see sites at the top of the results with very high PR (5 or above), or the first page being littered with high PR sites it might be prudent to avoid that particular term.
In that case, head back to our list of keyword suggestions and pick another, relevant phrase, and start the process again.
What we’re aiming for is a list of 3 to 5 keywords/phrases that we can then start to build into our site and finally use to promote our site through links.
In this case we’ve picked 5 keyphrases and a total of 6 words.
Our list might look something like this:
- rattan furniture
- rattan outdoor furniture
- rattan garden furniture
- patio furniture
- conservatory furniture
The thing to think of when picking keyphrases is that it helps if the words overlap – in our list we have furniture and rattan repeated across several phrases.
This helps because they’re going to be easy keywords and phrases to place around our pages without them looking unnatural or “stuffed”.
Next time we’re going to look at how to optimize your pages to target these phrases, and most importantly, help Google understand exactly what your page is about.
Editor Note: Ed Gray comes from a graphic design background, having started out in the UK Newspaper industry before moving to magazines and advertising before finally moving onto the web.
He has been designing websites for several years now and has been closely following trends in Web Standards, Accessibility and Search Engine Optimization.
He currently works as an SEO & SEM consultant for a variety of companies, including the Personal Travel Group.
Ed lives in southern Spain with his two cats, his iMac and his beloved Martin guitar.
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