Keyword research is the foundation of any SEO strategy. If you target the wrong keywords, you’ll never attract quality traffic that converts, but you already knew that. However, just because you know the goals of keyword research, doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing it right.
Let me explain. I’m a freelance copywriter, and I often get called upon by clients to rewrite their website copy because it’s just not getting the job done. More times than not, one of the key problems with their copy is that it’s full of jargon and industry buzzwords. These are keywords that companies use to describe their products and services; they aren’t the same keywords buyers use to describe them. As a result, there’s a disconnect, and the website doesn’t attract a lot of buyers. And the few people who come to the website end up leaving because they can’t cut through the jargon to clearly understand what the products and services are.
Getting on the same page as your buyers is crucial to achieving true SEO success. Here are some basic tips that will ensure you’re using the same keywords your buyers use.
Check your analytics to see how customers are arriving at your website. If you don’t already have analytics installed on your website, go get Google Analytics. With this tool, you can gain deeper insight into your website traffic. You’ll see which keywords visitors are using to arrive at your website and how they react once they land on your page. This is a good tool for understanding the types of phrases buyers really use when looking for your products and services.
Use a keyword research tool to see what people are searching for. There are plenty of keyword tools you can use to better understand which terms buyers are searching for. Remember, it’s not always about going for the term that gets the highest search volume. It’s about figuring out which keywords will bring in interested buyers that you can convert more easily.
Look at your competition’s website. I’m not saying you need to create a “me too” website, because that’s not going to convince visitors to buy from you. However, there are things you can learn by studying your competition. Take a look at the websites of your competitors, and try to figure out which terms they use to describe their products and services. Look at their title tags and source page to see which keywords they’re targeting.
Search social media platforms to see how people talk about your products and services. As a copywriter, one of the biggest benefits I get from social media is studying the way customers talk. If you can study the types of phrases and tone your target audience uses when talking online, you can better target your copy to connect with them. You can also get an idea of which words they use when talking about your products and services.
Are you sure you’re using the right keywords on your website? What have you done to make sure you’re on the same page as your buyers?
My head literally had only hit the pillow for about 30 seconds before I re-realized this thought again. Second place is truly the first loser. And I came to realize that more than ever just a few moments ago. My son lost is cell phone in the snow last week and it stopped working. What I should do is probably punish him and not purchase a new phone, but because I am a common idiot father, I am going to replace his phone with something even better.
So, I logged into my AT&T account and like always, they offer an array of free add-on phones for my family plan. Many of these phones were actually pretty cool. One of the phones that I thought was nice was the Motorola Karma. I can get this phone free. But at any rate, in the process of reviewing these various phones, I decided to jump over to YouTube to see if there were any reviews.
Here’s the part where I re-realized that “second place is the first loser.” When I was doing my searches for these various phones, I felt very strong at clicking the first result. What’s crazy about this situation is that many hours later — once again, head crashed on pillow only 30 seconds — I was able to fully understand the power of ranking #1 for something.
In the case with the YouTube videos, I was clearly able to see the view count of each video on the search result page. In a few cases, the second and third result had more views and in fact seemed even more relevant than the #1 listing. Yet, what did I do? You guessed it… I clicked on the first result and watched that video. Reflecting back on why I did this, I remember saying to myself, “Well… if YouTube thinks this one should be #1, then that’s the video I need to watch to get the best review of this particular phone.”
Was that true? Well, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is the fact that I clicked on the #1 result, and so do most people. So ultimately, the key to success is ranking #1. And this helps another point I have made many times before in the past. And that it is better to rank #1 for a keyword that only gets 100 hits per day than to rank on page two for a keyword that gets 10,000. No one looks at page two on Google. Not many people even look at the bottom first ten results.
Ranking #1 is the key. So that being said… when it comes to doing keyword research, or targeting various phrases, etc… remember to choose keywords, titles, and phrases that you feel you have the most chance at ranking number #1. Anything below that are simply losers…
Joining their series allows you to ask questions and offer a thumbs up or down vote on other questions already asked. The questions with the most thumbs up votes gets bumped to the top of the list. Each week, Avinash and Nick address and answer the most popular questions. While they haven’t been exactly addressing these questions once a week, they have at least been addressing them.
That said, if you’re really looking to buckle down and learn the In’s and Out’s of Google Analytics, I totally suggest tuning in to this video Q’s and A’s offered by Avinash and Nick. Here is a recap of the items that have been addressed to date.
Web Analytics Q & A With Avinash Kaushik & Nick Mihailovski: Part One
Strategies for non-bounced non-converted visitors (Macro vs. Micro conversion)
Ways to report total number of keywords over time
Benefits to tracking transactions as conversion goals
Tracking unique visitors to specific web pages
Path analysis for keyword reports — why it’s bad and what to do instead
How Google Analytics can be used on affiliate sites
How site owners can exclude themselves from being tracked by Google Analytics
How to properly track sites that reside on different domains but use a shopping cart on a different, common, site (cross domain tracking)
You’re going to want to view the blog post that correlates with the video because they include links to the resources discussed in the video tutorial.
Once again, if you’re looking to finally gain a better understanding of Google Analytics and how the program can help you, I suggest tuning in and listening to what Avinash and Nick say in these videos. While they said they’re going to be posting new videos weekly, it hasn’t been consistent. But that’s ok! I am pleased that they are doing them. That said, to assure that you don’t miss any of their new videos, I recommend subscribing to the Google Analytics YouTube Channel. Doing so, will get you a lot of great information in addition to the videos Avinash and Nick are providing.
Yesterday I wrote a post explaining about how Matt Cutts allowed the Google Webmaster Central team shave his head. I realized that some of the valuable information in that article that I wrote may have been hidden with all the excitement with Matt having his head shaved, so today, I want to bring the hidden jewels from yesterday’s post forward into this article. Specifically, I want to take a closer look at the 100+ short videos Matt Cutts published on YouTube and explain some things further that will help you understand more.
Should File Extensions be Used in URLs?
As most of you know, I am an avid WordPress user. Unless I am building from ground up, I use WordPress for all my website projects. That said, when I configure the permalink structure, I use the /post-title.php extension rather than /post-title/
The video provided by Matt Cutts confirms why.
Should nofollow links be used for Privacy Policy and Disclaimer Pages?
In the past, I have done this on my blogs. Usually I place sitewide nofollow links on my footer to my privacy policy and disclaimer pages. I am glad that I watched this video because Matt Cutts explains that the only reason why a webmaster would want to nofollow a page is to prevent the page from being indexed. The only reason why you would want to prevent a page from being indexed is if the page were to be determined useless. He further explains that privacy policy and disclaimer pages are very useful and they should not be nofollowed. An example of a page that should be nofollowed is a login page. Also Matt explains that it isn’t necessary to have site wide links to your privacy policy and disclaimer pages. A better idea could be to link to them from your home, about, and contact page instead.
Are Dates In URLs Search Engine Friendly?
I have debated about this for a few years with friends. I never believed that it was search engine friendly to include dates in URLs, if anything I felt like it placed important keywords too far to the right, causing some risk of them getting truncated in the SERPs. Matt Cutts explains that it’s a good idea to have a date stamp somewhere visible on your page for people, but it’s not something required by them, nor does it have any influence on ranking.
When I build niche sites that generate revenue using AdSense, typically I write 50 articles for the site and upload twenty of them immediately. From there, I use the WordPress scheduling feature to stagger the remaining 30 over the course of about three months. After watching these TWO videos, I suspect that doing this is unnecessary. Instead, I can now upload and publish all content in one session, and then use the extra time towards building quality backlinks.
How many pages can Google index from a single site?
Can I publish 100+ pages at once?
For now, that answers quite a few questions for me, I am sure that you’ll find this information useful as well. If you haven’t done so already, now would be a great time to subscribe to my RSS feed. As I drill down and watch more of Matt’s Grab Bag videos, I’ll piece more of them together here as I have done in this article today. Stay tuned… and in the mean time, you should take a look at his videos too. Be sure to check out the entire Google Webmaster Central YouTube Channel as well.
You might be interested in learning how to become a better webmaster. Fortunately for you, Google has created a service called Google Webmaster Tools. It’s a free service which allows webmasters to check the indexing status and optimize the search visibility of their websites. Specifically you can use Google Webmaster Tools to check and set the Googlebot crawl rate, view lists of internal and external pages that link to your site, discover which keywords people search to find your site, view stats about how Google indexes your site, submit a sitemap.xml file, generate and maintain a robots.txt file, and set your preferred domain to www or non-www. If you haven’t started using Google Webmaster Tools, you need start today.
That said, if you’re interested in taking your first step towards becoming a better webmaster, I recommend reading the Google Webmaster Tools blog and subscribing to the RSS Feed. Secondly, I recommend subscribing to their YouTube Channel and investing time towards watching their videos. Just announced today, they have 154 videos with nearly 11 hours of footage generating one million views.
In celebration of this achievement, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, honored a lost bet by allowing the Webmaster Central team to shave his head and upload the video to their channel.
It happens that Matt Cutts has been using Google Moderator to compile a list of the most popular questions about how to become a better webmaster. The end result was over 100 videos uploaded into the Webmaster Central YouTube channel in a play-list called Matt Cutt’s Grab Bag. If you’re serious about wanting to become a better webmaster, then I recommend that you invest time into watching these videos. That said, what advice, tips, and tricks do you have towards becoming a better webmaster? What are some other resources that can help too? Share what you know with everyone in the comments below.
