I recently received a broadcast message from a friend proudly announcing that their site had reached number 2 in the Google search results for their chosen keyword.
On the surface, this sounds like a great achievement, but was it the right achievement?
Let me explain ….
When selecting keywords, there are 4 main factors you should be considering:
- Relevance,
- Traffic,
- Commerciability, and
- Competition.
In other words, to get the best bang for your SEO dollar you want to target terms that are relevant to what you offer, have a large number of people searching on those terms and looking to buy (not just get information), and preferably have a low number of other sites also targeting them.
Relevance is generally pretty obvious – you don’t want to target “dog food” if you are running a restaurant (unless it really is for dogs). However, there are some keywords that are less obvious – it all depends on how others would search for your product/service, not how you would search for it. There are some objective measures of relevance, but I will leave them for a future post.
With the right tools, search traffic is easy to measure. Even Google’s free tools will give you a good estimate of the total search traffic on any given term. With a bit of basic math you can easily work out the sort of traffic you can expect if you reach #1 on the search rankings.
Commerciability is a little harder to get an accurate handle on. This is where a good SEO research tool (or provider) really comes in handy. What you are looking for is keywords that people are searching on when they are ready to buy, as opposed to when they are just looking around. For instance, consider the difference in intent between someone searching on “web hosting” (probably just looking at their options) and “Hostgator coupon” (already decided on what to buy, and is now looking for the best place to buy it from).
Competition is not so much a show-stopper, but it will indicate how long it is likely to take to rank well for your chosen keyword(s). You may want to start out with keywords that have low competition (less than 100,000 competing sites) so that you can quickly reach the top of the search rankings. If the market is lucrative, you may be happy to go after keywords with more competition, but it will probably take longer to reach the top of the search results.
So, how did my friend’s chosen keyword fare against these criteria?
- Her keyword was highly relevant to her product.
- The expected search volume was extremely low, with #1 position expecting only about 3 visitors a day.
- The commerciability was almost zero. People searching on this term were just not opening their wallets/purses.
- Competition was moderate (373,000), so she had done well to get to #2 – PASS.
So my assessment of this keyword was that even though she was ranking #2 on it, she probably wasn’t getting much more traffic. And she would have to work with her copy to turn those additional visitors into buyers.
I passed these comments on to her and asked why she had decided to target that particular keyword. Her reply was interesting:
Our keywords when we did research didn’t include targeted fat loss. We have outsourced video marketing, a few articles… to a team in the US. They found targeted fat loss to be a great long chain keyword so went with it. Since doing this site, we are getting traffic and sign ups, a few a day, but it’s not converting lately. We have had a handful, but would love more, so what you say is hitting home.
Just proves you really need to be careful who you trust your SEO to!
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