Yesterday I showed you how to examine your website traffic to see what search phrases and keywords people were using to arrive at your site. One of my old friends, a professional artist and creator of glass art that should give you some awesome corporate gift ideas, asked me (through Facebook):
This is a good question, and a process everyone should go through. Here's how I approach it:
First, you come up with a phrase that is a "seed" about you or your work. It's not the be-all that describes you, but just one topic you want to optimize your site for. Imagining I was Joy, I used "glass gift" and "corporate gift". You then use one of the tools out there that estimates search engine volume for that phrase and finds similar phrases. The first tool I suggest is the tool in Google AdWords called Search-Based Keyword tool. You can also just use the more generic Keyword tool if you don't want to skew the results based off what your site already says.
You enter your website and then some possible phrases and the tool lines them up with the actual phrases people are searching for, and suggests a few more based upon the volume and competitiveness of what people are searching on.
When I ran Joy's website through the tool with the two phrases above, this is the table I got:
Notice the number one phrase is "corporate gift ideas"? Using this phrase in her writing, and getting other people to link to her will help raise her rank on that phrase in Google and Yahoo, which is currently non-existent on this phrase. The list contains a number of other keyword ideas, some appropriate, some not (like "corporate gift tax").
Now she would need to find a balance between competition and volume in picking what keywords to use in her writing. "Corporate gift ideas" may have a lot of volume, but it's very competitive. Other keywords have less competition and less volume. These may be good candidates for buying Adwords on the results for if you don't write enough to be able to work all these different phrases into your writing regularly. Though Google gives you some suggested bids, you'll want to experiment on your own to find the right ones.
This exercise, repeated with several such "seed" phrases will build a list of targeted search words for her website. Knowing what Joy produces, I might suggest "glass art", "trophy", and "trophies". After settling on a list of terms, her next task is to go out and do two things:
- Incorporate these phrases into her already regular blog postings; and
- Find other people to link to her website using these key phrases as link text, like I did above.
Obviously, nothing is set in stone. Keywords vary by season, and sometimes no matter what you do someone else is out-writing and out-linking you. It's important to be flexible and re-examine your efforts over time.
Judging Your Efforts
And an important final word about that: do not judge yourself by the rank of your website on search engines. Judge yourself by the amount of traffic you receive from them, and if possible, by specific traffic on a keyword-by-keyword basis. It's true that when you have a higher rank you'll get more traffic, but measuring your rank is hard and varies a lot. You can receive a lot more traffic by being #3 on a lot of second tier keywords that together get 20,000 searches per month than by being #1 on one that gets only 10,000 searches per month.
After time, you'll want to measure how effective each keyword is in converting visitors into buyers, but I'll save that for a future article.
Comments