Part of the SMX Bootcamp Track, the Keyword Research session covered this fundamental part of any effective search marketing programme. Beautifully introduced by Chris Sherman, Christine Churchill of Key Relevance commenced with her presentation on Learning the Lingo of your customer.
If you can really get into keywords and understand the language of your customer, you are ensuring that you are giving yourself a head start with Search marketing.
Keyword research is vital.
• It is the fundamental step for search marketing.
• It corrects bad keyword choices. (remove insider jargon)
• It provides market research information – you might see a way of expanding your business
• It increases your conversion (success) rate through speaking the customer’s language
• It develops a list of relevant terms to target in SEO PPC, Blogs, Videos, Social Media marketing, and offline documentation.
• It gives competitive intelligence insights
• Keywords give ideas for site design and navigation
• You discover new keyword opportunities
Keyword research has 3 main stages, according to Christine: brainstorming; keyword expansion (tools); keyword evaluation… and she gave this key piece of advice: don’t just go after popularity numbers from keyword tools!
Keyword Brainstorming
Cast your net wide and gather as many keywords as possible. Where do you start? Look at your current web site, speak to your colleagues, customer services department, press releases, etc. Look at company reviews (3rd party reviews); your log files or analytics which shows what people are looking for when they come to your site. Use the long tail search terms and make sure you look at the single visitor phrases. Site Search is a treasure chest of keyword data.
Talk directly to the customers: ensure that you are understanding what they are looking for. The sales department will have modified their speech patterns for the customers – use this. Look at your competitors – what words are they optimising for? What are they buying for PPC? If they are buying it, it could be an important keyword.
Using Tools
Christine gave a brief overview of Google’s keyword tools, WordTracker, Keyword Discovery, Microsoft Ad Intelligence (UK database to follow in the next few months). She advocated using several but not to obsess over the numbers, just gather interesting, relevant keywords for your company’s products or services.
Evaluating Keywords
You do the brainstorming, use the tools, you develop a huge list of keywords, so now what? Think about:
- Relevancy – you need to get targeted traffic
- Popularity – be careful about over focusing on this one. Slightly longer phrases are less competitive but are often higher converting.
- Consider user intent. You need to get into the mind of the user – buying vs browsing e.g. mortgage calculator vs fast mortgage loan. Your keywords are key to identifying where people are in the buying cycle.
- Evaluating by competition – how active are your competitors in each keyword space?
- Competitive intelligence
- Test keyword performance early – use PPC to test candidate keywords. This gives quick quantitative feedback on the keyword performance whilst controlling the costs.
The Microsoft Editorial Take….
Chris then introduced Tor Crockatt, Group Manger Editorial Operations at Microsoft gave the perspective from a predominantly paid side. In her lively and animated presentaion, she started by sharing the OED definition of a keyword:
Keyword: key to a cipher (secret or disguised way of writing), word of great significance indicating the fundamental importance of keyword research.
So why make your keywords relevant?
Seems obvious to anyone used to working with sites, but when you are investing your time in this, sometimes you need to explain this to the ‘powers that be’
Relevant • Engaged & buying customers• Quality of Keywords impacts brand• Highest position at lowest CPC (ROI!) Irrelevant • Annoyed users• Wasted efforts
According to Tor, the basic keyword research steps are as follows:
- root work / concept – e.g. travel
- synonyms – e.g. holiday / break
- colloquialisms - e.g. trip, getaway,
- qualify with modifiers – e.g. late holiday deals, cheap holiday Australia, city break, luxury getaway
Tor then introduced ‘Keyword Algebra’, a way of building out keyword phrases using a variety of different modifiers in a logical, ordered way. The following modifiers can be added to most keywords to build them out into phrases that represent your online products or services:
- Product / concept - laptop, digital camera, insurance etc
- Add adjective (product) e.g. cheap, low cost, green, high speed
- Manufacturer
- Location – NY, UK
- Intended action - buy, quote, apply, book
- Intended user (for) men, back to school
For example: compare low cost fuji digital cameras / budget 2007 las Vegas real estate
Chris and the audience posed several questions, including:
Will keywords grow in importance or diminish? Right now the use of keywords will expand not contract. They will become more important as it is through language, predominantly, that we convey our message.
As an overall take-away… What was the key message from the session? Research, research, research, refine, refine, refine… then repeat. Pitching just right to the audience with a blend of the basics and thought-provoking points, these two superb speakers gave a great introduction to Keyword Research, this important and vital fundamental of both paid and organic search advertising.
