Your SEO Idea Bank
Maybe you’re an anarchist at heart, and it takes divine intervention to get your feet into two matching socks. But more likely, you’re just so overworked that it’s impossible to keep every sticky note and e-mail where it belongs. You need help—and we’re here for you! Before you begin your hour-a-day tasks, follow these simple steps to start your new SEO lifestyle with a “headquarters” on your computer. We call it your SEO Idea Bank!
Step 1: Create a home for your SEO files. Choose a location on your computer or net- work where your SEO files will live. Having one location for your SEO files will keep things simpler for you.
Step 2: Download tools from yourseoplan.com. On the companion website to this book, www.yourseoplan.com, you’ll find the worksheets and templates that we’ll be referring to throughout this chapter. Take the time to download these now and save them in your SEO Idea Bank:
• Keywords Worksheet
• Site Assessment Worksheet
• Rank Tracking Worksheet
• Task Journal Worksheet
• Competition Worksheet
• SEO Growth Worksheet
And don’t forget to copy your Goals Worksheet from Chapter 1, “Clarify Your Goals,”
into your SEO Idea Bank as well. From time to time throughout the rest of this book, we’ll send you to the website to fetch some more helpful documents for your SEO Idea Bank.
Step 3: Start an SEO Task Journal. Your SEO Task Journal is a place to document what you’ve done, what questions have cropped up, and what you need to do in the future. Your Task Journal will prevent you from duplicating your efforts and help you keep track of what you were thinking last week and the week before. It’s also a con- venient holding pen for ideas and random thoughts that come up while you are work- ing on Your SEO Plan.
One of the fun things about SEO is wandering down whatever path your explorations take you. But if you only have an hour and you actually want to accomplish something, you’re going to need to keep yourself on track. Rather than going off on every tangent that is thrown your way, file those thoughts away in your Task Journal for later.
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If the Task Journal isn’t your cup of tea, use whatever organizational method works for you. You may be happy using a simple Microsoft Word document and changing the font to strikethrough when the topic is resolved. But feel free to get fancy. Con- sider experimenting with an online database in your own personal Yahoo! Group at groups.yahoo.com, or an online to-do list through a service such as tadalist.com.
With your SEO Idea Bank in place, you’re ready for the fun stuff: choosing keywords!
Week 1: Keywords
Ask any SEO pro what the single most important part of an SEO campaign is, and we bet you’ll get this answer: “Keyword choice!” Here’s why: The keywords you choose this week will be the focus of your entire optimization process. Keywords (also referred to as keyword phrases, keyphrases, and keyterms) are the short, descriptive phrases that you want to be found with on the search engines. If you put the time into choos- ing powerful keywords now, you are likely to be rewarded not only with higher ranks, but also with these benefits:
• A well-optimized site, because your writers and other content producers will feel more comfortable working with well-chosen keywords as they add new site text
• More click-throughs once searchers see your listing, because your keywords will be highly relevant to your site’s content
• More conversions once your visitors come to your site, because the right keywords will help you attract a more targeted audience
As SEO expert Jill Whalen told us, “There is more than one way to skin the SEO cat…. There is no special formula that will work for every site all the time.” And this applies to your keyword targeting strategy. We suggest that by the end of this week you have 10 target keyword phrases in hand. We believe that this is a reasonable level for an hour-a-day project. But you may be more comfortable with 2 or 20 keywords.
We welcome you to adjust according to your individual needs.
Here are your daily assignments for this week:
Monday: Your Keyword Gut Check
Tuesday: Resources to Expand and Enhance the Keyword List Wednesday: Keyword Data Tools
Thursday: Keyword Data Gathering Friday: Your Short List
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Your Name Here
Recently, we were chatting with our friend Mark Armstrong, an auto mechanic in San Francisco.
Hearing that we were working on an SEO book, he shared a common frustration:“All I want to do,”
he said,“is find the official website for this supplier out in Chicago. I know the name of the com- pany, but even when I enter their name in the search engines, their website is nowhere to be found. Now that is just ridiculous! There should be some system where companies always come up first for their own name.”We couldn’t agree more, but due to the dynamic nature of competition and the innate complexities of search semantics, there’s no guarantee that your site will come up first when someone searches for your organization’s name.That’s why we always recommend including it on your list of top target keywords.
Monday: Your Keyword Gut Check
Today you’re going to do a brain dump of possible target keywords for your organiza- tion. You’ll need two documents from your SEO Idea Bank: the Keywords Worksheet and your Goals Worksheet.
In the Keywords Worksheet, you’ll find columns with the headings Keyword, Search Popularity, Relevance, Competition, and Landing Page. Today you’re only worried about the first column: Keyword.
Now, take a look at the list of conversions that you came up with on your Goals Worksheet in Chapter 1. You’ll use these as jumping-off points for your key- word brainstorming session.
We met Jason back in Chapter 1 when he was thinking through his target audi- ences and the goals of his SEO campaign. Jason’s company, Babyfuzzkin, sells unique, high-end baby clothes. We’re going to follow him through his keyword week.
For now, you’ll jot down whatever comes to mind, and save the fine-tuning for later. Here are a few ideas to get you started:
Be the searcher. For each conversion you wrote on your Goals Worksheet, take a few minutes to put yourself in the mind of each target audience that you listed. Imagine that you are this person, sitting in front of a search engine. What do you type in the search box?
Name who you are and what you offer. No keyword list is complete without your organization’s name and the products, services, or information you offer. Be sure to think about generic and proprietary descriptions. Jason may jot down more generic
Now: Go to your SEO Idea Bank and open up the Keywords Worksheet and your Goals Worksheet.
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words like “baby shower gifts” and “baby clothes,” but he should also include trade- marked names like “Babyfuzzkin” and a list of the brand names he’s selling. Likewise, if it’s equally accurate to describe the products for sale on your website with the terms
“spray bottles” or “X7 MistMaker Series,” add both to your list.
Name the need you fill. It’s not just what you offer, it’s the itch that your product or service scratches. So Jason might write down “baby shower gift ideas” or “baby clothes free shipping.” If you sold home alarm systems on your site, you might want to list terms that describe your customers’ needs, such as “protect my home” and “prevent burglary.”
Think seasonal. Does your product or service vary from season to season? Do you offer special services for special events? Think through your whole calendar year. Jason at Babyfuzzkin may want to list words like “baby swimsuits” and “Size 2T Santa Sweaters.” A spa resort may want to list things like “Mother’s Day Getaway Ideas”
and “Tax Time Stress Relief.”
Embrace misspellings, alternate spellings, and slang. Here’s something you probably know better than any SEO expert: Alternate spellings and regional variations on your keywords. Jason bristles when he gets mail addressed to “Baby Fuzzkin” or “Babyfuss- ing,” but he knows his company name is easy to get wrong, so he’ll add those to his list.
On a regional note, a company selling soft drink vending machines had better remember to add both “soda” and “pop.” You do not need to consider variations in capitalization because search engines are not sensitive to caps (besides, the vast majority of searches are lowercase). However, you should include singular and plural forms on your list for further evaluation, and be sure to consider variations in punctuation, too: “tattle tale,”
“tattletale,” and “tattle-tale” are not necessarily the same words to a search engine.
Locate yourself. In Chapter 2, “Customize Your Approach,” we suggested that brick- and-mortar organizations include variations on their company name and location in the keywords list. If your company does business only in Michigan, you really don’t want to waste your SEO efforts on a searcher in Nevada. And did we mention that search engines sometimes aren’t all that smart? They do not necessarily know that “OH” and “Ohio”
are the same thing. So be sure to include every variation you can think of.
Self-packaged yellow tropical fruit snack
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Now that you’ve got an idea of what you’re looking for, you can choose to brainstorm your list alone, or, better yet, brainstorm with members of your PR, sales, marketing, and writing teams. This can work well as an e-mail exercise, too; just shoot out a request for your colleagues to send you their own ideas for keywords.
When Homographs Attack
Homographs are words that have the same spelling but different meanings. For example, invalid means both “not valid” and “a person who can’t get out of bed.” Search engines have struggled with homographs since their inception.
As mothers to young children, we have a strong interest in making sure our homes are lead free. So naturally, we use the search engines to learn how. Unfortunately, the word “lead,” meaning “a soft, heavy, toxic, malleable metallic element,” happens to have a homograph:“lead,” meaning “travel in front of.”The environmental-lead-testing search results are crowded out by pages with informa- tion on leadership! In order to get the information we need, we have to lengthen our search phrases:“lead abatement,”“lead contamination,” and “lead poisoning.”
Acronyms are particularly susceptible to this problem. One site we know (we’ve changed the name and identifying details to prevent embarrassment), Massive Media, Inc., has spent years targeting the term “AMC,” which is an acronym for one of its products. But just in the top 10 Google results, this term is represented by the following entities:
• AMC Theatres
• The AMC network movie channel
• The Appalachian Mountain Club
• Albany Medical Center
• Australian Maritime College
• American Mathematics Competitions
• Applied Microsystems Corporation
None of these has anything to do with what Massive Media was trying to promote! Clearly, in targeting this acronym, it was navigating the wrong waters. It doesn’t make sense to spend your energy competing with such a broad field.
If you are unfortunate enough to be promoting a company or product with a name that shares spelling with a common word or acronym, you will need to brainstorm on what secondary terms your target audience is likely to add and combine words to find a more appropriate term to target.
Possibilities are the geographical location of your company, the generic term for the product, names of well-known executives, or the term “company” or “inc.” And as a general rule, don’t target acronyms shorter than four letters long.
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Once you start spitting out your list, don’t overedit yourself; you’ll have time for editing later. For now, we just want you to get all of your keyword ideas in writing. By the end of tomorrow’s task, you should have a big, hearty list—say, at least 50 keyword ideas for a list that will be trimmed down to about 10 by the end of this week.
Tuesday: Resources to Expand and Enhance the List
On your Keywords Worksheet, you already have a nice long list of possible target phrases.
But are there any you missed? Today, you’ll troll on- and offline for additional keyword ideas. We’ve listed some of the places that additional keyword phrase ideas could pop up. There are more ideas here than you can use in just one hour, so pick and choose based on what’s available to you and what feels most appropriate to your situation:
Your Coworkers If you didn’t get your team involved in keyword brainstorming yes- terday, be sure that they jump on board today. It will help your campaign in two ways:
First, they’ll provide valuable new perspectives and ideas for keywords, and second, they’ll feel involved and empowered as participants in the plan.
Your Website Have you looked through your website to find all variations of your possible keyword phrases? Terms that are already used on your site are great choices for target keywords because they will be easier to incorporate into your content.
Industry Media If there are any magazines or websites devoted to your trade, take a look and see what terminology they are using to describe your product or service.
Remember, now is not the time to edit your terms! So if the words are in use out there, be sure to include them on this list.
Your Website Statistics If you have access to a program that shows traffic statistics on your website—that is, a web analytics tool—review it to see what search terms are currently sending traffic and conversions your way. Terms that are already working well for you can be great choices for target keywords. We’ll walk you through choos- ing and reviewing analytics tools in Week 4 later in this chapter.
Your Customers If you (or anyone on your SEO team) have the ability to check in with customers about what phrases they use to describe your products or services, now is the time to get in touch with them and find out! Your salespeople might also take this opportunity to confess: “Oh yeah, it’s called Closure Management Technology on the website, but when we talk with customers, we always just call it zippers.”
Your Internal Search Engine If your website has a search box on it, it’s time to get sneaky! You can use its usage information for your SEO campaign. Talk to your
Now: Go to the Keywords Worksheet and start your list under the Keyword column.
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webmaster about collecting the following information about site visitors who use your internal search engine:
• What terms do they search for?
• What results are they shown?
• What pages do they choose to click on (if any)?
Keep a running list of top terms your site visitors are searching for; these are likely to be good target keywords for your SEO campaign.
There’s plenty more that an internal search engine can do for you. Visit Chapter 10,
“Extra Credit and Guilt-Free Slacking,” for more information.
“Related” Terms on Search Engines Many search engines offer suggestions for related terms after you perform a search. For example, Ask has “Narrow Your Search” and
“Expand Your Search” columns along the left-hand side of the search results that show a variety of terms related to your search (see Figure 6.1). These related terms can be good additional keyword choices.
Friends, Neighbors, and the Unexpected One major problem we have observed with keyword choice is that businesses tend to become too caught up in the insider terminol- ogy they use to describe themselves. If your target audience goes beyond industry insid- ers, be sure to seek out input from unexpected sources. Your friends and neighbors or even the neighbor’s kid can provide surprisingly helpful ideas.
Figure 6.1Related terms on Ask
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Competitors’ Websites Later this month, we’ll have you digging through your competi- tors’ websites like a hungry raccoon in a Dumpster. For the moment, try breaking up keyword writer’s block by browsing your competitors’ sites to see what terms they are using to describe themselves.
Wednesday: Keyword Data Tools
You’ve got a nice long list of keywords. But the list doesn’t mean much to you until you find out which of these keywords are actually being used by searchers. You’re also going to want a sense of how competitive the SEO field is for a keyword so you can get a handle on just how hard you might have to fight to rank well for it.
Fortunately, there are keyword analysis tools available to help you suss out this important information. And also fortunately, there are not so many different high- quality options to choose from, so the decision is far from overwhelming. We’ll discuss the top three here:
• Wordtracker
• Keyword Discovery
• Google AdWords Keyword Tool
Today is a “study hall” day. You’re going to find these tools and get your feet wet using them.
Wordtracker
Wordtracker is the keyword research tool of choice for many professional SEOs. In a nutshell, it tells you how many people are searching for the terms you may want to use on your site. It does this by monitoring and recording searches on meta search engines throughout the Web. You can use it to get an estimate of how many searches will be performed for a given term, and it is also an excellent source of related terms and com- mon misspellings (see Figure 6.2).
Wordtracker doesn’t give an up-to-the-minute snapshot—its data reflects searches that took place a few months before you retrieve it. Wordtracker is available at www.wordtracker.comfor a fee.
If you decide to go this route, you can use Wordtracker today and tomorrow as the primary tool for whittling down your long keyword list into something meaningful.
If you need to be frugal, Wordtracker makes it easy for you: You can purchase low-cost subscriptions in one-week or one-month increments. They also offer a free version of their tool at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com. Although this version lacks some fea- tures of the full version, it’s a very useful reference tool.
Now: Go to the Keywords Worksheet and add your new ideas to the list in the Keyword column.