WHY ARE SOME KEYWORDS MORE COMPETITIVE THAN OTHERS?
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"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
- -Animal Farm
You want to be number one. Your mama said you should be number one. So why do does your site show up on page 12,492 of the search results?
Keywords.
Some keywords are just more equal. You may have the most SEO'd page in the world, passing even the Panda and Penguin updates without a scratch, but that won't rank you anywhere near the first page of results unless you can track down the keywords that fit your business model.
Let's say you own a pet shop. "Pets" (over 13 million searches last month according to Google Adwords) will grab everything from tiny sea monkey insurance premiums to python diet plans. "Pet shops" (2 million searches) will bring you yard sales for bunny babies and emu egg investment scams. "pet shops online" (165K searches) features electronic pet forums in Japan and circus bear warehouse support in Belarus. A keyword phrase like "pet shops online that deliver same day to San Francisco Bay area" narrows it down a bit, but now you've got a string of keywords that will be searched exactly once a decade and a sales conversion rate of 0.00%.
You need to discover the most competitive keywords for your specific strengths so that your SEO can deliver the right traffic, i.e. searchers who won't just bounce away in irritation at the irrelevant results.
The big problem is that keywords have no inherent value. Like stocks, their value fluctuates day-to-day, often second-by-second. Without tranquilizing them and putting a tag in their ears, you don't know where your keywords are headed tomorrow. And you can't re-optimize your website for new keywords every time the search trends cycle around.
So to get long-term, meaningful data you have to aggregate the values over time. ?The amount of time you need is exactly what most businesses don't have. ?You may need new sales for some fast cash flow to survive or you may operate a company where the revenues are zeitgeist dependant, like an online delivery service for pet bats trying to capitalize on the release of The Dark Knight Rises in July.
SEO tools
So many businesses turn to the free SEO analysis tools available from the major search engines. When you bump up against the limits of these free services you can get more detailed reports with SEO software suites or subscription sites like?SEOMoz.
Many of these services offer a tool that checks ranking difficulty. You enter the keywords you want, and they tell you how impossible it is going to be to get a decent rank based on your company size. ?To determine how competitive a specific term or keyword phrase may be, they use data like:
- total number of searches per month
- searches in quotes (exact searches)
- searches with allintitle (keywords appear in the website's title)
- searches with inanchor (the url itself contains the keyword, a good indication that the entire site is dedicated to whatever you are searching about)
- highest PageRank of the top sites
- total links pointing to the those site
- maximum bid price for those and related keywords
- total ads using closely related keywords
Pay special attention to the PageRank and total number of links. Since link farms have been attacked pretty consistently by search engine spiders, the number of links is a good indication of how long your competition has been sitting on this keyword.
Take the advice of?Sun Tzu: the best way to win is not to fight. Go around your competition and gobble up the under-served markets. This motion generates its own momentum in terms of market share.
Securing the appropriate keywords, specific enough to get you to page 1 but competitive enough to get a decent audience, is of vital importance to the health of your online presence. Don't skimp on this decision in terms of money or time. ?Once you are comfortable with what your front-end search is doing, you should really take a look at your back-end.
Let's talk about your long tail?
Long tail represents the vast majority of search results. Maybe 10% or 20% of the people searching for a business like yours will be exactly the keywords you have prepared for. The rest are rare or even one-of-a-kind searches that find your site by a lucky accident. ?Although small individually, the accumulations can add up to a flock of new business.
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For example, let's say your site sells all kinds of stuff featuring the iconic bird of paradise --BOP.net. ?Naturally, you will optimize your site for "bird of paradise," but you must be creative in imagining other ways people will try to find what you offer. ?Long tail searches could include "New Guinea birds" or "paradise sicklebill" or even "birds with long tails" among the infinite possibilities.
How do you deal with all this uncertainty. Many businesses don't even try. They put they're time and money on battling the big guys for the 20% and leave the thorny complexity of the 80% alone. ?But there is a strategy to capturing long tail (without?putting salt?on it).
World-building
The secret is seeding your potential customer searches through fans, followers and dedicated communities. ?Forums are great places for millions of variations on the theme of your business to be planted on your website by people who think like your prospects. Hosted blogs with plenty of guests and crosstalk in comments is another reliable source. You can also farm out a host of white papers on issues related to your industry to gain some fresh ideas and terms describing your core business.
Another great point about this approach that search engines treat this as natural or organic SEO, which is what crawlers are looking for more than ever. Sites with keyword stuffing and poor content took an enormous ranking hit with the?last round of updates.
At the end of all this, you will have a solid delivery device for pre-interested and motivated traffic to keep an animal house full of prospects coming to your site every month. Keeping them there long enough to buy something is a completely different problem.
Images compliments of Creative Commons, public domain.
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