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How the Buying Cycle Affects Your Keyword Research – A SPN Exclusive Article

By Nick Stamoulis in Featured

Keyword research may be the single most important factor contributing to your online marketing and SEO success. The keywords you select will determine who can and can’t see your site for any given search. Incorporating the right keywords into your content helps increase your online brand presence, drives targeted traffic to your site, affects what search phrases your site ranks for and more. Missing out on important keywords, or putting the wrong keywords on the wrong pages, means missing out on potential clients and customers. If your site isn’t ranking for the right keyword, you might as well be invisible online.

Sites need to choose keywords on a page-by-page basis based on two things. First and foremost, you have to choose keywords that accurately reflect the content on the page. Search engines rank individual pages, not sites as a whole. Secondly, you have to choose keywords based on the intent of your target audience. That is where the buying cycle comes into play.

When a searcher is at the beginning of their buying cycle, they are usually in research mode. They’re just “shopping around,” bouncing from site to site to gather information from numerous sources, which they will use to influence their future purchase. For instance, first time parents might spend a couple weeks researching baby cribs for their new nursery. Who are the big crib manufacturers? How much do their cribs cost? What kind of reviews have their products received? What kind of crib is best for newborns? First time parents have a lot of questions, so they turn to friends, family and the search engines for answers. They might use search phrases like “baby crib styles,” “top rated baby cribs, “nursery furniture” or “nursery design ideas” to get them started. These are informational searches.

Depending on the kind of information someone is looking for, they may or may not be looking to make a quick transition from research to buying. For instance, someone scrolling through Yelp reviews, trying to decide where to eat lunch that day is going to make a quick decision. Someone looking to make a big purchase (like cars, electronics, furniture, etc) might spend more time researching their options.

As consumers move through their buying cycle, then tend to search using more long-tail keywords. Instead of searching for “baby crib,” the first time parents search for “portable folding crib bedding set.” These searchers have a better idea of what they are looking for and are searching for a specific thing. They might search for a company or product by name or include buzz words like “buy” or “order” in their search phrase. As consumers near the end of their buying cycle, your chance for converting them goes up. They are looking to make a final decision.

So what does this all have to do with your keyword research?

You have to decide what kind of visitors you want finding your site, and then put yourself in their mindset when conducting your keyword research. How would you search to find your site? No matter where they are in their buying cycle, a visitor to your site has the potential to convert. You want to make sure they land on the right page for where they are.

For instance, let’s say you own a jewelry store and are looking to build up your engagement ring business. Someone at the beginning of their buying cycle might search for “engagement ring styles.” This person isn’t ready to buy yet; they don’t even know what kind of ring they want. However, just because they aren’t ready to buy, that doesn’t mean you don’t want them finding your site. If you can position your site as a one-stop-source where they can get all the information they want AND make a purchase, you have a better chance of getting them to convert.

However, having them land on your homepage doesn’t answer their search. Your homepage shouldn’t be targeting “engagement ring styles,” but “engagement ring store” instead. That better reflects the content of your homepage. Visitors to your site want to find the information they need quickly, otherwise they’ll leave. If your keywords don’t match up with the content, they may feel like they’ve been tricked into visiting your site.

Instead, create a page of content that focuses on “engagement ring styles” and other related keywords; build an engagement ring guide for soon-to-be fiancés. You can talk about stone cuts, setting, band types and so forth. You want to position your company as the expert in engagement ring styles, there to make the process of selecting the perfect ring much easier. To keep that visitor more involved with your site, you can link from the ring guide to various internal pages of engagement rings you sell, so they can see the finished product and possibly convert.

You want your site to include a variety of keywords that will match up with searches no matter where someone is in their buying cycle. Obviously you want to target those at the end of their buying cycle, since they are more likely to convert. But you shouldn’t forget about those just looking for information. You don’t know how quickly they are hoping to make a decision and you have the opportunity to leave a good impression on them. They may bounce around to a few sites, but ultimately settle back on yours because you were the most helpful throughout the whole process.

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Nick Stamoulis is a Boston SEO expert and owner of Brick Marketing, a Boston SEO services firm. With over 12 years of industry experience, Nick Stamoulis shares his SEO knowledge by posting daily updates to his blog, the Search Engine Optimization Journal, and Publishing the Brick Marketing Newsletter, read by over 140,000 opt-in subscribers.

Article Marketing – Get The Basics Right First

By Toby Russell in Featured

In your Article writing try-using AIDA, (stands for Attention, Interest, Desire and finally Action) possibly the most recognized method ever for creating great copy writing for content, ads, articles – you name it, it does the trick. After all being successful online is all about being able to successfully ‘market’ yourself and your products or services on the Internet to the right-targeted visitor.

Sounds easy but its not, here’s what happened to me early on. When I first started out, I wrote some copy, read all right, put it up and thought naively as it transpired that I’d suddenly have loads of traffic – blimey, didn’t think that one though at all, then a friend said to me ‘you did do your keyword research?’

Wow that was a light bulb moment – because no I hadn’t, I was pretty Internet ‘green’ back then, so yes I’d written a great article but because there were no keywords in it that people were actively searching for, it got buried on probably page 365,000 of search results – not my finest hour by any stretch.

So rule No. 1 is do your Keyword Research well and comprehensively. But also here are a couple of other key areas to help you in your article marketing activity, so read on.

Researching your Subject Successfully

To be successful in article marketing your research is key, research your chosen niche, read a variety of articles online or in books and other literature, I always find magazines a great source of information and there’s bound to be some in your chosen niche (if not then you should be worried) then make sure you have done your keyword research as well, not like me who then felt a total idiot when the obvious was pointed out to me – stupid or what!

Building Trust Through Your Writing

Writing articles has many people stumbling and believing it’s not easy especially when you do not have a clue about the niche you are writing on. To make your article writing experience easier, it is better to start out in areas that you are comfortable with. These are likely to be topics you are already familiar with and in which you can have a steady flow of information almost like a conversation.

But here’s the real key ‘like a conversation’

Get quickly to the point where you’re writing style and therefore the kind of articles you are writing are in a conversational and matter of fact manner- it will be like talking to your best friend, this is a really important part of creating content – articles, blogposts etc – if you always try & craft it as though you are having a conversation with a friend you’ll find it easier, your writing will be more believable and you’ll build trust faster.

Look at it this way-what do you know about me – you know I write my own copy, you know I’ve made stupid mistakes in the past- hopefully I’ve connected with you through my writing, and that’s what its all about!

Don’t Overlook Keywords Like I Did

Over and above the AIDA approach, article marketing requires the targeting of keywords as I’ve identified. Articles should be written around a certain set of keywords that best define the service, product or niche you are involved in. If you can properly target keywords within the title and body of your article, then you will be successful in your article marketing campaign as search engines would place you in a position where website visitors will have easy access to your site.

Not Familiar with Keyword research?

Sorry if this bit sounds a bit basic but hey we all have to start somewhere and there will be some reading this just starting out so bear with me because keywords are vital, so here goes …Keywords are the words website users are likely to type into search engine boxes when looking for a specific topic. To make the best out of your article marketing efforts you start with a keyword research. Keyword research means you trying to figure out the words with the highest number of searches within a given period say a month.

The reason for this is to estimate the amount of traffic that keyword or phrase generates monthly. A keyword with high traffic can mean more sales potential and vice versa.

When the keyword you are interested in has a low search numbers it therefore follows it has lower competition levels (i.e. fewer competing websites), you have an even better chance to easily rank higher on search engines.

Don’t Overlook Other ‘Marketing’ Opportunities

There are other forms of website promotion such as pay-per-click (PPC), forum posts and blog commenting, but article marketing has proven to be highly effective when done properly. This is because an article that is rated “high quality” will be used over and over again in different websites on the Internet. All these link back to your website – how cool is that? Yep now possibly you can see why Sam (my wife) & I bang on about the power of article marketing, now ‘heads up’ the links, traffic etc is not immediate but its sustainable and that for us is more important.

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Toby Russell, Internet Marketer, Publisher & Property Investor offers tried and tested methods to help you succeed on line. Want to know more about Article Marketing? Get his popular Free Special Report – features over 10 pages of Key Copywriting hints and tips that will have you writing like a “Pro” in no time. available at => http://www.startinternetmarketingonline.com

5 Quick SEO Wins

By Aliza Earnshaw in Featured

Cover the basics, rank higher in search

You’ve got a great business, and a great new website. You keep checking Google every day – okay, multiple times per day – to see where you rank. But you’re still on page 3 or 4 – or maybe not even ranking that high. What’s wrong?

What you need is a little search engine optimization, or SEO. Yes, it’s true that SEO is a complex field, rife with conflicting opinions. Nonetheless, taking a few simple steps can help your site rank better in search engine results, and attract more visitors.

Note: If you aren’t the person who built your website, you’ll need help to make some of these changes. “Simple” is a relative term.

1. Do keyword research.

If you want to attract new customers to your website through search engine results, you’ll need to use the same words on your site that people use to search for what you sell.

Second Golden Rule on Keyword Research: Traffic

By Elmar Sandyck in Featured

We discussed earlier the first golden rule in keyword research about finding relevant keywords for your niche. Now that we have obtained our relevant keywords, we now proceed to the second golden rule:

Finding High Traffic Keywords

The only time you actually welcome high traffic is if you generate it because of relevant keywords that drove people to your website. It’s a fact that some keywords generate high levels of traffic while other keywords generate low levels of traffic. Receiving little traffic is not enough and is disappointing.

One of the best ways of improving your traffic that will really make a significant difference is by using the Market Samurai keyword tool.

Let’s discover how this works.

When you enter a word or phrase in the search engine box of Google, for example, it will then generate page results that will display related articles to your chosen keyword or phrase. Generally, a high percentage of people will choose to explore the website ranked number one. A smaller percentage of people will choose to explore the number two ranked website and so on.

According to Market Samurai, the average breakdown of these percentages is as follows:

The number 1 ranked website receives 42% of clicks

The number 2 ranked website receives 12% of clicks

The number 3 ranked website receives 8% of clicks

The number 4 ranked website receives 6% of clicks

The number 5 ranked website receives 5% of clicks

The number 6 ranked website receives 4% of clicks

The number 7 ranked website receives 3% of clicks

And the remaining clicks are shared between all the other sites listed in Google.

Clicks refer to the number of times people actually clicked through your website upon seeing it in the Google page rank results. Clicking through the link will, of course, direct them to your site, ergo, providing traffic. (Just imagine the stark difference in percentages from the number 1 ranked website to number 2. A whopping 30%!)

SEO Traffic

However, lest you get disappointed with a “more or less” results for the traffic you want to achieve and the actual traffic your website is actually getting through your manual efforts, Market Samurai has the nifty tool SEO Traffic (SEOT) which gives you an indication of the maximum daily visitors that the #1 ranked website in Google could potentially receive from each keyword. SEOT features a trends column which provides a visual representation of the monthly traffic trends for each keyword. The graph always provides twelve months of trend information. It is also particularly useful for identifying keywords that are very seasonal.

There are actually easy steps that you could follow in this tool that helps you identify high traffic keywords and are worth targeting:

Set a traffic filter. In SEOT, all you have to do is just click the plus sign (+) next to SEO Traffic and enter a minimum traffic value. The suggested traffic value is 80.

Any keyword or keyword phrases that do not have the potential to deliver at least 80 visitors a day to the number 1 ranked website in Google will be weeded out.

Set a Phrase to Broad match filter of 15%. Also discussed in the first golden rule, this is used to filter out any misleading terms from Google.

Relevant keywords? Check.

High traffic keywords? Check.

What else is in store in keyword research? Find out what’s the third golden rule in the next post!

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Find Out How Elmar Sandyck Uses High Traffic Keywords To Establish A Very Profitable Online Business By Visiting www.InternetMastermindStrategy.com.

Reader Rescue : How Do I Tackle Regional Keyword Issues in SEO?

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Hey Kalena,

I’m trying to optimize a site for the first time. Its a fashion jewelry site. I have come up against a couple of stumbling blocks that I need a little clarification on. One is the target market – its a New Zealand website, but we want to target New Zealander’s, Australians and the rest of the world this brings up issues of spelling – do we focus on Jewellery (New Zealand/British spelling), Jewelry (US spelling, but where a lot of the current customers come from) or Jewellry (a common misspelling).

Secondly, I’m having a hard time trying to choose my keyword phrases. Silver jewelry and costume jewelry (which seems to be the most common way people search for fashion jewelry, even though fashion jewelry sounds so much more modern!! – found out through the Google Keyword tool) seem to be the best as they are well searched for. I want to be more specific however i.e *women’s silver jewelry*, or *silver jewellery nz* or *buy silver jewelry* etc. but the search volume according to the Google Keyword tool is well below 20 per day.

Can you please suggest what I should do in this situation?

Thank you!
Mitchell

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Hi Mitchell

To answer your questions:

1) The regional spelling issue is a tricky one. There are a few ways you can approach this – do you have the .com as well as the regional Top Level Domains (TLD)  .co.nz and .com.au? If so, you can use the American spelling on the .com domain and the British spelling on the regional domains. However, this may create duplicate content issues unless you block robots from the near-duplicate pages.

Alternatively, you can simply use the appropriate language version for your largest target market as the default throughout your site. For example, although we are based in New Zealand, our main target market for Search Engine College is the US, so we use American English throughout our web site. Most regional markets will understand that American English is common on the Internet, so you should not isolate them by doing this.

Another, trickier, option is to use British English on your main site to attract organic local search traffic and then create a Pay Per Click advertising campaign (e.g. Google AdWords) with tailored landing pages and ad text using American English to suit your other markets. Then, run your PPC campaign targeting only those countries where American English is used more commonly, making sure you block search engine robots from indexing your American English landing pages. You could do the reverse if you decide American English should be your default language.

As for misspellings? Those are fantastic for picking up extra traffic your competitors are missing. Best way to get that traffic is by targeting the misspelled keywords within your Pay Per Click campaign or by including the misspellings in your Page Titles and META Tags (the META Keywords tag is a particularly good place for them if you don’t want human visitors to see them).

2) You are spot on wanting to target the longer tail keyword phrases such as *women’s silver jewelry* and *buy silver jewelry* because it is these specific phrases that are more likely to bring you qualified visitors who are more ready to purchase. But the beauty of targeting these longer phrases is that they also contain the more popular shorter search terms such as *silver jewelry* and *women’s jewelry*. So, by default, you are also optimizing your web site for these shorter phrases by integrating the longer ones into your tags and page copy.

Choosing long tail phrases that contain more generic popular search ones is a great way to save valuable keyword real estate in your page titles and meta tags. For example, instead of having to include both *buy silver jewellery*, AND *silver jewellery* in your meta description tag, you only need to include the longer one as it covers both. A META Description tag of “Buy women’s silver jewelry from French Fashions” sounds a lot less redundant than “Buy silver jewelry and women’s silver jewelry and silver jewelry from French Fashions”, don’t you agree?

When researching keywords for multiple international markets, remember to use a keyword research tool that offers regional search data so you can pinpoint what persons are searching for in each country. Apart from regional spelling, regional jargon such as (accommodation vs lodging) can impact keyword search trends considerably.

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Got a Reader Rescue question of your own? Post it in the comments and you might see it featured here on the blog.

Back to SEO Basics with Keyword Research

By Jill Whalen in Featured

I was speaking with a client the other day who commented on my home page, which talks about my tried-and-true SEO process. “Has your process changed much over time?” the client asked.

I stopped to think for a moment, and realized that while there have been plenty of changes to my SEO process at any given point in time, the fundamentals have mostly remained the same. While Google likes to keep throwing curve balls at SEOs, their algorithm changes and new products and services don’t impact most well-developed websites.

It bothers me no end when I go to search marketing conferences to find perhaps 3 sessions that focus on SEO fundamentals, while 100 others focus on the superfluous SEO techniques du jour that may or may not bring more targeted visitors to your website. Don’t get me wrong — those more “advanced” sessions can provide awesome nuggets of information for those who already have their fundamentals in place. Yet sitting in on site clinic review sessions often reveals that most of the attendees’ websites have a long way to go with even the most basic SEO strategies.

With this in mind, today’s article focuses on your first line of SEO defense — keyword research. Optimizing for the wrong keywords — either those that are not truly relevant to what your business offers or those that aren’t being used by searchers — will have the dire consequence of making you think that SEO is mythical marketing magic that doesn’t work.

To make it easier for you to follow, I’ve broken down my keyword research process into the following 7 steps:

Reader Rescue: Am I Choosing the Right Keywords?

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Dear Kalena

I have a business here in the UK offering training in Microsoft Office products such as Word, Excel and Outlook.

I am a bit confused about the keywords I should be optimising my web site for and I was wondering if you could give me a little advice on my choices?

My first instinct is to optimise the site for the following:

1.Training
2.Excel
3.Word
4.Help with spreadsheets
5.Excel consultancy
6.Spreadsheets
7.Essex
8.Suffolk
9.Online support
10.Onsite support
11.Training
12.Excel help

thank you!

Mary

————————————–

Hello Mary

The main purpose of keyword research is to get you thinking about all the possible keywords you could target, including those used by competitors or more importantly, those NOT used by competitors. So as well as coming up with your own seed list, you should be looking at your competitor’s web sites to see what keywords they are targeting and whether or not you should be using similar keywords.

However, I am a bit concerned by the keywords you’ve chosen for your own site. How many people who type the word *training* into a search engine are specifically seeking training in Microsoft products provided by a consultant in Essex, UK? People typing this search query in might be looking for football training coaches, or training shoes. Or scuba dive training in South Africa. Same goes for the word *Essex*. People typing that in are more likely to be looking for tourist information, accommodation or school project information than for MS training.

You’ll realize this as you learn more about search engine optimization, but you need to choose two, three and four word keyword phrases that are more tailored to your exact offering and therefore more likely to attract visitors to your site who are specifically seeking the services you offer. These visitors have a higher likelihood of converting to customers.

Search phrases you’ve listed like *help with spreadsheets* and *Excel help* are great, but phrases such as *MS Office training* and *how to use MS Word* would be more relevant for you than some of the other keywords you’ve listed.

Once you have a good seed list of keywords, you can run them through a keyword research tool to check how much potential traffic they will bring to your site and streamline your final choices for SEO.

Happy keyword hunting!

Kalena

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Got a Reader Rescue question of your own? Post it in the comments and you might see it featured here on the blog.

Reader Rescue: Why Is My Regional Keyword Research So Inconsistent?

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Hi Kalena

I feel like I am stuck with my keyword research.

I am researching SEO keywords for an Australian business that specializes in tree removal and tree felling. The keywords I chose for them were “tree removal” and “tree lopper” however when I enter these into Keyword Discovery for Australia I get nothing (although “tree removal” comes up with quite a bit for global search.

These keywords best describe the business and although the tree removal operator prefers not to be called a tree lopper he is happy for me to use this term for search engine purposes.  Yet when entering these keywords into Google it seems a lot of competitor sites come up.  I am confused!  Can you help?

Louise

————————————–

Hello Louise

In my experience, most keyword research tools (such as Keyword Discovery or WordTracker) are highly inconsistent or downright inaccurate when it comes to regional search databases.

What I would do is to use the global database when choosing the best keywords to target and then see how they go in terms of bringing you traffic. You can tweak the keywords as you go based on the response and traffic you get. I would start broad e.g. “tree removal”, “tree felling” and then narrow your market based on the responses you receive e.g. “tree removal [city]“ or “tree felling services”.

Another way to measure your potential regional market is to set up a basic pay per click campaign using Google AdWords, targeting Australia only and targeting the keywords you wish to test. Then monitor the number of impressions that your keywords get. Note I said impressions and not clicks. Set the budget low or design your ads in a way you don’t necessarily attract clicks (so it’s a cheap and dirty experiment).

The number of impressions you get per week will give you a ballpark idea of how many Australian searchers are looking for those particular keywords in Google per week.

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Got a Reader Rescue question of your own? Send it to kjordan [ at ] sitepronews [ dot ] com and you might see it featured here.

Reader Rescue: How Do I Target Specific Suburbs Using SEO and PPC?

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Hi Kalena

My husband runs his own business. He is an electrician working in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney, Australia, doing mostly domestic electrical work.

We employ a pay per click agency as well as a web page optimiser until such time as I am confident to do it my self. We monitor each very carefully to try and find out what works for us.

I am running key word research and incorporating suitable keywords into my husband’s site. And now that I am actually going through the motions of putting this into practice, I am having trouble justifying these words, as I know his clients don’t use these words to find our service.

Both the optimiser and the PPC agency have come up with the same keywords I have, and when I typed these words into Google to see whom or what popped up, the results were mostly irrelevant to our products. Although I could see these words used in our sub pages e.g. “Install ceiling fan”, “down lights”, “switch board upgrade” etc, I don’t feel these keyword phrases are strong enough for our home page. We are not competing for these keywords, we are competing for the local area and the electrician service within our local area.

Our business is usually found by people typing in the word “electrician”, then the suburb or CBD, inner city etc. These are the words I would like to target. So my question is, how do you target specific suburbs in your city?

Thanks
Kim

————————————–

Hi Kim

Regarding the search terms such as “install ceiling fan”, “down lights”, “switch board upgrade”, these are excellent choices to target with SEO because they are likely to be less competitive and provided you optimize your pages carefully enough, you should be able to rank well for them, provided they are relevant to the service your husband offers. If they aren’t, there’s no point targeting them.

Regarding targeting terms such as “electrician [suburb]“ – it’s going to be difficult to rank highly for such generic terms using SEO alone, so you might need PPC to win that war. Thankfully, Google AdWords enables you to set up location based advertising.

You can choose a particular geographic area, a range of suburbs, a particular city etc. You can even have your ads shown only to persons located in a specific number of city blocks – via customized (latitude and longitude) targeting! You can specify this when you create a new AdWords account. With location-based targeting, the suburb name appears below your ad to make it more relevant.

Another great way to target a specific market is to use dynamic keyword insertion, where a particular keyword is inserted into your ads automatically based on a search query or searcher location.

So you could have your AdGroup target individual suburbs such as “electrician North Sydney”, or the city as a whole such as “electrician Sydney” etc. Your ad could say something like:

Electrician {Keyword: Suburb}
Emergency electrician available
24 hours / 7 days a week.

Then if a searcher enters “electrician North Ryde” or “electrician Strathfield”, your ad will come up and show the relevant suburb in the headline. Powerful stuff!

I recommend you read up on dynamic keyword insertion and give it a whirl in your AdWords account.

Kalena

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Got a Reader Rescue question of your own? Send it to kjordan [ at ] sitepronews [ dot ] com and you might see it featured here.

Keyword Research Basics for SEO

By Dave Davies in Featured

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… there is no more important step in the SEO process than keyword research. One could make a compelling argument for link building or for architecture or for copywriting but at the end of the day – ranking highly for keywords that either don’t convert or which you close up shop waiting to rank for isn’t going to help too terribly much so in my opinion – I’d put keyword research higher in importance. In fact, when I’m building affiliate sites my first step is to look up keywords and competition levels – then I look into products and websites and this method has worked very well indeed. It insures that I choose keywords that will both convert and that I can rank for in a period of  ime and with an effort level that matches the return.

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