When embarking on either a PPC campaign, or an SEO effort, the question of keywords usually comes up (it should anyway).
Keywords are not words in the traditional sense, but rather phrases. Although “Key Phrases” would be a much better term, for some reason “Keywords” has persisted.
What are the keywords your customers would use to find what you have to offer?
There are quite a few keyword research tools on the market, ranging from free to very expensive. Probably one of the best ones is still the keyword tool inside of Google Adwords.
These tools give you suggestions based on historic search trends, and you will often end up with a HUGE list of keywords.
However, these lists are not indicative of current and local trends. A much better way of determining your BEST keywords, is to let the masses tell you.
A rather quick way to do this, is to set up a very broad PPC campaign, and then to monitor the actual real-time traffic and the keywords that were used by searchers who clicked through to your website. Of course, you should track conversions as well.
This gives you incredible insights on what people are REALLY searching for.
Having real data or real search terms also gives you valuable insight on which keywords you want to AVOID. These you set up as negative keywords in your PPC campaign.
After a while, you can then analyze the volume of keywords, and start SEO campaigns on selected keywords that have proven well in PPC.
From the Lab
Many years ago, we thought that “Calgary web design company" is a great keyword, and a much better keyword than the generic “Calgary web design". The logic being that anyone looking for web design is not necessarily looking for a company to do their web design work.
After we re-generalized our campaign and watched what the TRUE searches were, we learned a few things.
1) Even though “Calgary web design” is a more general keyword, it is the highest converting of all keywords. Expensive, but effective.
2) There are a lot of negative keywords we missed, like “tutorial” and “classes”. Searches including these words are not our target market.
Just FYI, the tool we used to understand our traffic is our own real-time visitor traffic monitor : globi footprints.
Andreas Huttenrauch
I didn't invent the Internet, but I sure watched it be born and grow up."
