Helping SEOs to do Better Keyword Analysis: Tips for Website Owners

Keyword research is the essence of any SEO campaign. Whether you build thousands of links for your website or you hire a specialized On-page SEO expert, it is the “selection of keywords” that matters the most. Informative content, attractive design, highly optimized On-page metrics – nothing is as important as your target keywords are.

After all, it is the right set of keywords you need to know people will use to reach your business.

If you don’t, there is a high chance you end up –

• – Struggling for ranking for majority of keywords for the rest of your life
• – Ranking high for irrelevant keywords that have lower search volume i.e., no conversion
• – Increasing bounce rate of your website due to ill-targeted visitors
• – Decreasing CTR (Click Through Rate) which leads to potential loss of customers

In the end, you start cursing your SEOs for everything that did not work for you. In fact, many advertisers ask for refund or demand free SEO service from their providers as compensation. However, it only worsens the relationship between advertisers and service providers.

A few quick questions for site owners though

• – Did you allow your SEO people enough time to spend in keyword research and analysis?
• – Did you help them find out your potential keywords?
• – Were you satisfied with the finally selected keywords your SEOs started with?
• – Did you measure them in terms of relevancy to your business, competitions and search volumes?
• – Did you analyze the nature and the strength of your business corresponding to the selected keywords?

Well, you may think “Why should I pay attention or spend time for the work I am paying for or, the field I am not expert at? Why can’t professionals take an optimum decision themselves and do everything perfectly for my business?”

Let me tell you, professionals can only suggest a bunch of prospective keywords based on some real-time statistics and estimates. Those data are always helpful. However, it is you who need to do a mix and match and sort out the final ones. With Google’s frequent algorithm updates, it is of utmost importance now than ever. You cannot just sit and wait for the dream results. No one knows your business better than you do.

Share the responsibilities

Remember, it is never easy to pick the best suitable keywords at one go. You had to have enough contributions during the early days of keyword research. Believe me, this works and will for the rest of your life. Help your SEOs to serve you better.

Facts to consider

Finding a set of 20- 30 well- researched and prospective keywords may take you around a month. Could you believe this? This is a fact which most of the website owners ignore during SEO outsourcing. They usually are in a haste to rank high on SERPs. This eventually results in less research work for keyword selection – the key to successful organic search marketing. Here lies the problem.

So, what are the effective ways you can add value to keyword research and analysis report generated by SEO expert?

Here we go:

1. Analyze your website from user’s point of view

Identify key texts on your website that describe your business offerings the best. These are important terms that talk about your domain knowledge, expertise and service specialities. You need to find and justify the reasons for search engine and users to value your site for those terms. These are the primary keyword ideas that will help your SEOs derive secondary and associate keywords. Take time while you do this research work. It is worth gold .

2. Do a SWOT analysis

Know the Strength, Weakness, Opportunity and Threat of the keywords you will use. Keywords with high search volume may look promising, but you also need to consider the level of competition associated with it. On the other hand, You may expect higher rankings for less competitive keywords , but they may not have standard search volume. You need to maintain a balance while analyzing the risk return trade off.

3. Check the set of keywords generated by Google Adwords keyword tool:

This report is worth considering (though not 100% convincing) as far as search volume is concerned. You may ask your keyword analyst to include other keyword suggestion tools.

4. Understand why your competitors rank high for certain keywords you want to target

It is not that you cannot beat your competitor for the same keywords, but you need to understand that there could be other factors other than SEO that helped your competitor rank for high value keywords. Look for other On –page factors, keyword distribution in the page contents and degree of citations.

5. Follow but don’t copy your competitors

Analyze competitor keywords only to get an idea and to create similar type of keyphrases. Don’t encourage SEOs to jump on them without proper evaluation.

6. Look for Google trends report

Make sure you do this for each of the keywords you target. Knowing the trend will help you forecast the value of the keywords in long run. Keywords showing a decreasing trend over the time in your territory may not be ideal to work on.

7. Distribute target keywords in groups or sets:

This works. If your total number of target keywords is 100 and you have 20 pages to target, you have around 5 keywords per page (on an average) to optimize . Thus you get 20 sets of closely related keywords which will consist of short and long tail keywords .This is just a rough estimate though. Thus you get a clear idea on the type and number of keywords you need to finalize. This keyword assortment will also help you with link development program.

Conclusion:

Finally, make sure you are aware of the final keywords and their ROIs before optimizing them in Google. It is better to spend another $500 or take a few more working hours for the job than cursing your SEOs for rest of the life. Switching SEO companies now and then will not help you in this as well. Take calculated decision and you sure will win.