Keyword Research is one of the early stages of SEO and can easily be overlooked (or second guessed – i.e. assuming a keyword will be relevant, when it’s not). A mistake at this stage can lead you to optimising for the wrong keywords, going after more competitive or lower-converting keywords; ultimately reducing the ROI. So how do you know what the right keywords are? Think searcher intent.
Word order is important. I had a client ask me whether word order made any difference — I gave them the above example.
Searcher Intent is all about getting in the mind of the person that entered a particular keyword. What do they want ? Why did they enter words in that order? Once you make this part of your regular keyword research, you’ll come up with keywords that other sites have neglected; getting you more qualified leads.
There are several aspects that I think about: first, whether a seemingly-obvious keyword could have other connotations or meaning. If you’re optimising for ‘jaguar’ (thanks to this YouMoz post for that example!) for your blog on big cats, you’re going to find you run into a LOT of competition from a certain Indian (who knew?) car manufacturer. The next thing I consider is, are my customers/readers/’whoever pays my bills entering that keyword looking for information? A product? Something else? If I’m working an ecommerce site, I’ll focus my attention on the ‘buy’ keywords (more on those further down). If I’m SEOing a review site, I’ll focus on the ‘information’ keywords, for example.
I look at words like ‘review’, ‘shop’, ‘price’, ‘comparison’, ‘information’, ‘spec’. All words that, when added onto the end of a ‘subject’ word, signify what a searcher hopes to find from their search.
Once I have a list of words obtained from the Google Keyword Tool, I’ll begin to think around those words. I’ll add those ‘intent’ suffixes and prefixes to the keywords and think about what phrases people would actually look for. I’ll use tools like Ubersuggest to find out what people are actually searching for related to the keywords that Google Keyword Tool gave me and come up with a new, improved list of targeted keywords.
A Ridiculous Example
Let’s say you’ve got a client who runs a website selling gourmet coffee and coffee accessories. You’re not going to optimise for the word ‘coffee’ because that would be ridiculous. But let’s suspend reality for a moment, and consider why that would be ridiculous. It’s ridiculous for two reasons:
1) Coffee is an incredibly competitive term – you have sites like Starbucks and Wikipedia dominating the SERPS – it would take huge amounts of hard work to get a site there.
I can’t drink this. When I search for ‘coffee’ I want the location of my nearest coffee shop.
Image courtesy of http://www.sxc.hu/photo/664329
2) Who, when they’re looking for gourmet specialty coffees and espresso machines, searches simply for ‘coffee’? Even if you did (after some real SEO hard labour) get your client’s site to #1 for the term ‘coffee’ it would be unlikely you’d get an especially good CTR or conversion rate for your niche gourmet coffee website.
This very simple (and obvious) example illustrates the importance of searcher intent. Assuming your client’s KPI is a little more complex than just ‘send me more traffic’ (as well it should be); you should be much more inclined to go for a keyword that converts 30% of the time, but gets 25 searches a month, to one that converts 0.2% of the time but gets 3000 searches a month. It’s going to be a lot easier to rank high for the former than the latter, and your client’s conversion rate will go up – showing a definite sales increase.
What sort of keywords should I be optimising for then?
Staying within the realm of ecommerce SEO, look at the following keywords and how they change the intent of the searcher:
- buy [product] – okay this one is obvious, you probably do this anyway.
- [product] online – suggests searcher is looking for an outlet selling the product online, rather than just information.
- [product] [size] – specifics are good – if a searcher is looking for a size, it suggests they’re closer to buying.
- [product] free shipping – specifying shipping costs suggests a searcher is looking to purchase.
These types of keywords will be a lot less competitive than [product] type keywords. They also have the advantage of showing a more-qualified searcher landing on your site
Other keywords to look out for include:
- Model codes, product codes and other very specific information. If you can land a searcher on an exact model in the exact colour they’re after, the chance of them buying shoots up. They’re a lot higher quality traffic to get than getting someone who has searched for a generic term.
- Words like ‘present’ and ‘gift-wrapped’ suggest an intent to buy.
- Niche-dependent words: Website for a car dealer? Optimise for ‘[car name] test drive’.
This is more than just a ‘focus on long-tail search’ advice post (or at least I hope it is). It’s a conversation I have with clients who know enough to be dangerous, but not enough to be useful. Those clients who already have keyword lists in mind, and are after a ‘build links with this anchor text, now build links with that anchor text’ approach – not the way I prefer to work.
Talking to them about searcher intent before I start is a good way of showing my knowledge of SEO. By which I mean, you’re not going to start spouting off about canonical URLs, and rel=”no-follow” links to show you know what you’re talking about, as they’ll probably give you a blank look. Talking about searcher intent, however, shows expertise that they can understand. It shows you understand their customers, and they can see that (hopefully) you know better than they do when it comes to SEO.
Nathan Amery carries out SEO for Pretty Klicks, a web agency based in Edinburgh and Glasgow in Scotland. He can be found on Twitter @namery, or writing the Pretty Klicks blog.
