The Importance of Keyword Research

05. June 2007

Discovering optimal keywords for your web site is essential to your success. The discovery process, also known as Keyword Research, provides the framework necessary to determine your market and define the message you should convey.

Without this process you may be proceeding aimlessly. Imagine, for example, creating a mailing without targeting an audience, knowing the potential of the market, or the message to present. It is obvious that this approach is ill-advised yet web sites are created and added to daily in this very manner.

Keyword Research provides considerable information which may be utilized in business and marketing strategy. It could best be dubbed “SEO Market Research”. Examples include:

Competitive Landscape - Understanding volume, traction, and sophistication of competitors can help you to determine your potential for market penetration based upon your site’s scale and online marketing budget.
Marketing Strategies - Observing and reverse engineering the strategies implemented by your competitors enables you to better understand the requirements and costs associated with achieving top positions.
Market Potential - Determining the potential of your chosen market is critical at all business stages. The concept stage however is where the most benefit may be obtained. Analyzing competitive factors such as search volume and industry standard click-through and conversion rates will help you to determine the base-line value of a market and its viability based upon your objectives. Most online ventures would have been significantly better off had they implemented keyword research at the concept stage. They could have saved time, money, speed to market, opportunity cost, or outright failure.
Opportunities - Your chosen market may be determined to be a winner. If not, you may frequently find that hidden opportunities are revealed which provide greater potential than originally anticipated. Why struggle in- and throw
resources at- an overly competitive and/or non-existent market space when your efforts could be applied in more constructive areas. This is true opportunity cost savings.
Behavior / Content –Each time a searcher enters a keyword term in a Search Engine they are casting a vote for the content they actually wish to see. Aggregating and sorting those searches can provide a map which enables
you to fulfill the requests of those searchers. This permits you to allocate your spend in areas which can provide the greatest return.

I Know My Business Well So Why BotherInvariably when approached by clients and prospects it is discovered that they have a preconceived notion of terms which they feel best position their product or service. It is often difficult to sway them from those terms. Research often proves that those terms, while valuable in traditional media, have little value to the businesson the web.

During a conversation with the director of a risk management firm this phenomenon was exhibited. Naturally the director was adamant about utilizing the term “risk management” and was uneasy about using other keywords as a lead.

The SEO Cop Out
The strategy appears to be picking easier keywords to rank well with. Many SEOs utilize this strategy because they are simply unable to achieve good rankings on competitive keyword terms. A question would then come to mind: Is this an SEO cop out?

It may appear so but your site should achieve better results in a shorter timeframe utilizing this strategy. We have also previously determined that this strategy spreads risk and reduces superfluous costs.

Clarity
This process does cause concerns regarding the perception that generic keywords will be ignored. This is actually not the case. On a risk management web site the specific keywords and site copy are often derived from and contain the generic keywords. Additionally, writing about a vertical difficult without utilizing terms that are generally utilized within that industry. This will, by default, put you in competition for those keywords.

The strategy will however place emphasis and effort on those keywords which will provide the most profits for you.

Keyword Objectives - What Are We Doing Here
It should be stated that it is common for executives and business owners to be tenacious about giving up on certain terms. Often they wish to pursue keywords because a competitor is ranking well with it. Or they perceive a generic term is considered too valuable to ignore. It is essential that those decision makers understand that they either have the budget to market those terms and the thoroughly researched terms or that this desire will take resources from where their profits will likely be derived.

This process not designed to increase traffic though it will. It is not designed to improve rankings which it should. It is not designed to beat competitors on the SERPs. It is designed to increase your top and bottom lines. That is it. After all, are you in the rankings business? Are you in the traffic business? Let me ask you a simple question: Would you prefer to rank well or to convert business?

The Strategy
It is often said that “business is about the client” so let us think for a moment about what is going through the mind of someone searching for risk management services. The searcher is unlikely to find much benefit in the use of the “risk management”term. The quality of the result would be poor due to the sheer volume of web pages containing the term and the diversity of its use. The term is so generic that 99% of those results could be unrelated to the needs of the searcher.

As of this writing there are currently 78,300,000 web pages containing the “risk management”term according to Google. If you were searching to source this service you would find that, of the first ten results, there is only one risk management firm which is in position number eight. Many of the top positions are .org and .gov sites.

It is possible to rank number one with that term. The question is: what resources are available to the client and are they being best utilized pursuing that term? In this example the firm is a small, independent consultancy and, while the term should not be ignored, the director would be best served by focusing on other terms. Beating those competitors would require great effort and funds for a term which would not necessarily provide the results they need: conversions. In SEO this would be an opportunity cost.

To continue with this example let us note that their specialty is in the insurance industry. With that knowledge we refine our keyword research and discover a new term: “risk management in insurance sector”. This keyword generates a predicted 13 earches per day and only has 7 competitors. This is not impressive volume but it is approximately 400 searches per month or nearly 5,000 per year. If this term were one of many it would represent a great start.

Conversion rates on specific keywords can be significantly better than their generic counterparts. In our example it would not be uncommon to find conversion rates of specific keywords to improve by two or three or even a thousand times better than the generic keyword you started with.

Optimizing your landing page to improve conversions can amplify those rates. The meager 5,000 searches could translate into hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenues for our risk management firm example. The key to this strategy is to find numerous keywords of this type which, in aggregate, help to build a highly profitable campaign.

Safety In Numbers
Another reason to look for more and better keywords is to spread risk. Placing all of your SEO eggs in one basket is unwise. If your rankings should drop on one keyword you would be toast. Ranking well for a number of keywords makes for a less stressful web experience.

The Objectives
The goal of keyword research is to increase conversions by generating more qualified traffic, to provide opportunities to extend or focus marketing activities and therefore content, and to determine the quality of a given market. Please refer to our SEO
Market Feasibility Study services for more information on this topic.

In traditional media there are at least three basic requirements for any successful ad campaign. If you are missing any one of the three requirements your campaign is likely to fail. Defining your audience is a sound place to begin. After you have determined your audience you are then able to craft a resonating message and place it in media which targets them. Just three tasks. Sounds simple doesn’t it?

In my reference to traditional advertising you may be questioning the relevance to the web. In reality, the principles are the same. The processes may differ but in general, the basics of marketing still apply. Direct response marketing for example, asks a simple question: do you wish to purchase this item or service? We should perform the same task on the web. The key is to ensure that the question is presented to the correct market.

With so many savvy marketers out there it is therefore surprising to observe the volume of web sites that overlook basic principles. Most web sites are created without a proper objective and without knowing who their target audience is or how to reach them. Most businesses don’t truly understand what a web site should do. Click to view our article: What
is the Purpose of a Web Site. The result is that most web sites do not make money.

Therefore, before beginning any web site development, it is prudent to begin by determining your target audience. As a Search Engine Marketing firm we are, naturally, focused upon Organic Search and Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns (For justification of this focus, please see separate article.) This is our true medium. And, unlike highly targeted traditional media, search engines typically appeal to a generic audience. To refine and qualify the traffic which is to receive our message we utilize Keyword Research which may be better described as SEO Market Research(SM).

The process brings your market(s) into focus which then permits you to create and/or refine your content so that it resonates with your newly defined audience - an audience which is highly qualified and growing in numbers.

All too frequently webmasters generate content is created with no intended market resulting in missed opportunity and misapplication of resources. They generate content and/or use keywords which they believe is useful but in fact, may miss the mark significantly. Proper keyword research reveals terms which searchers actually find useful. This is a significant distinction.

Keyword research drives a web site. As mentioned previously it refines and qualifies traffic. The process also reveals the interests of your audience which enables you to generate a message (content) which resonates with them. This message is then picked up by search engines and presented to searchers in the SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages).

Without proper research the Search Engines may not comprehend the relevancy and importance of your web site in your market and therefore will not deliver the traffic you deserve.

Therefore, keyword research should be the lead component of any search engine marketing campaign.
Keyword Research also works to establish a balance between search volume and competition. For example, a new web site with a small marketing budget which contains only a few pages may have difficulty taking rankings away from the so-called authority in the field - a mature web site with a large budget and thousands of indexed web pages.

Compounding this problem is the sheer volume of competing web pages for specific keyword terms in the SERPs. If the search query returns 30 million web pages competing for that term then the newly established web site has a very steep hill to climb. This sounds like there is little hope for a newly established (or mature for that matter), small site doesn’t it? Bear with me for a moment. There is light at the end of the tunnel.

Through the discovery process keywords may be found which, in aggregate, drive more traffic with less competition. Often the keywords can be more specific which provides the benefit of qualifying traffic. For example the search term trucks in Google results in 79,900,000,000 competing pages at the time of this writing. In contrast, however, the new 2007 Chevrolet Silverado results in 126,000 competing web pages. Certainly less competitive and more targeted.

The downside to this, if you could call it that, is that the former search term trucks receives an estimated 9,234 searches per day on the web vs. the latter the new 2007 Chevrolet Silverado which only receives an estimated 37. This raises the question. Which would you prefer? 80% of 37 searches or 0% of 9,234?

This is not to say that you can not become number one for trucks. It is possible. It is not easy or inexpensive though. And, 37 searches per day do not make a business. If you had a number of keywords however, the traffic in aggregate would provide significant growth to your business. This is the strategy we are after.

The Process
Our keyword research approach involves many steps including: