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I’ve got an excellent interview for you today on the 4 Golden Rules of Keyword Research with Eugene Ware, CEO of Nobel Samurai, creator of market-leading keyword research software Market Samurai.

Eugene Ware

I’ve set up and link at www.26WeekPlan.com/ms which takes you straight to the Market Samurai download page, so make sure you get your copy.

Here’s the full interview transcript…

Eugene Ware Interview Transcript Part 1/5

00:00 David Bain: I am very lucky to be joined with… Joined by Eugene Ware today, the CEO of Noble Samurai. Eugene has been involved at the high-end of internet marketing for years, but quite often as a trusted man behind the scenes. He has successes that include making $570,000 online in just 37 minutes and Ed Dale described him as the smartest internet marketer that nobody’s ever heard about. But that certainly changed since the launch of his Market Samurai. Eugene, many thanks indeed for joining me.

00:32 Eugene Ware: Pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

00:34 DB: Thanks. I’ll tell you what, can you possibly begin by telling us a little bit about you and your background and a little introduction to Market Samurai perhaps?

00:43 EW: Yeah, sure. I guess my… Unlike probably a lot of big name marketers and such, my background is actually from a software engineering background so, I was a software engineer. I was quite heavily involved in dot-com booms and worked in Silicon Valley and all that kind of stuff. And I usually tell that just because I know there’s a lot of people who are interested in internet marketing who go, “Hey, you know, I’m a techie guy, and all this marketing stuff just seems really, really difficult. I can never do that kind of stuff,” but that’s my background, I didn’t have a marketing bone in my body so that’s my… That’s sort of where I come from and I’m just being… I guess doing the internet marketing thing for probably about 10 years now? So probably before most people sort of heard of the way or the concept of internet marketing. I guess, I have worked behind the scenes. I worked with Ed Dale on this project called the Internet Eagle’s Project which was basically a forerunner of what came to be known as Ed Dale’s and Frank Kern’s Underachiever Method. I was… one of the people that were part of that team.

02:02 EW: I also worked for an internet marketing company that was in the property investing industry and sort of cut my teeth doing a lot of marketing, direct marketing to via email through that business and that story about the $570,000 in 37 minutes was… We heard about this whole concept of launches and we decided, “Hey, let’s give it a go. Like, you know, if it works in America, let’s give a go in Australia in this market.” And it sort of worked way too well. It crashed a lot of servers and all that kind of stuff. And in fact, the reason it was 37 minutes was basically the host of the server went down and we basically posted: “Web page going on, it’s all broken. Please send through emails to us with your phone number and we’ll actually call up and take the payment details.” So, basically it went… It took us about three days to actually call everyone up to take payments for this service, but the actual… The time stamp of the last email that we took before we sold out this mentoring program for probably investing was 37 minutes. So yeah, this lot of stuff actually does work.

03:26 EW: Then I guess after that I went on to basically do internet marketing consulting in ’02, something like yourself David. And I did a lot of SEO, that kind of work. As a result of that I basically developed a range of tools that I was just using on a day to day basis for doing all sorts of SEO kind of work and in particular, I’m quite passionate about market research, in particular, keyword research on the internet. And one day I was at a conference with Ed Dale and I was just showing what I was working on and he goes, “Hang on, we got this… That’s really awesome. We got this thing called the 30-day challenge if you would turn that into a commercial product, that would help a lot of the people who do this 30-day challenge every year.” And that was basically the start of Market Samurai. That day it was actually called Keyword Samurai and yeah that was actually three months away from the actual the beginning of the 30-day challenge so it was an incredibly stressful three months, to try turn around a commercial product in that period of time and there was a time where actually, we didn’t actually leave the offices for four days. In fact one of our business partners came in and brought us clean pairs of underwear, deodorants, and toothbrushes, just because personal hygiene wasn’t that too great of a period. We’re sleeping in server rooms and to the buzz of servers and basically taking shifts sleeping, coding around the clock to make this very, very tight deadline of the first of August which was typically when the 30-day challenge started every year.

05:09 EW: So, yeah that’s it and with 30 days later, when the 30-day challenge was over, basically it was quite an incredible, we weren’t sure what the response would be. It’s one of those ironic things when you actually do keyword research around the market of actual keyword research, trying to build up a keyword research tool, it’s not a very positive picture, but the result was very, very well received. And after 30 days, I think 12,000 people had tried it and half of these people ended up buying which was just incredible. So, that was basically how we got started.

05:48 DB: Wow, superb. So you’re obviously certainly known as the keyword research expert as it were at the moment. Was that by choice or is that an area of internet marketing that you particularly enjoy more than anything else or do you think you got a particular skill for that?

06:02 EW: It’s probably like everyone who is into internet marketing. They sort of get known for one thing that’s not necessarily the area that they are most passionate about or that they’re best at. It’s just that you tend to remember people like that and that’s how they’re known. One of the ironic things I’ve done a ton of SEO optimization, made my living from it, made hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from SEO activities, but I enjoy it. That’s, I guess, I mean only part of the things I’m actually interested in. I’m more interested in solving hard problems to do with marketing, things like copywriting for example. If you want to get known as a copywriter or that kind of stuff, but producing software to help people to do copywriting and solving hard problems I’m passionate about. People start off in this world of internet marketing but don’t necessarily have all the skills or have their ten thousand hours of shift instead if they’re into the Outliers book by Malcolm Gladwell and trying to give them tools to help them to succeed and cash in on this dream, which is internet marketing, which gets sold by too many people, too many snake oil salespeople, get rich quick and stuff, and I really actually say… Actually it is really, really possible. It’s not as easy as what people think, and that’s why a lot of… In fact you’ve got this 26-week plan, I mean; it’s a lot easier to sell the 3-minute plan.

[laughter]

07:37 DB: I know, I know.

07:38 EW: The 26-week plan, so that good on you, if you’re going to actually… It’s giving people some realistic time frames to get some results and learn the core skills in starting out. It’s not even about getting the results; it’s about learning and acquiring the skills so it’s not so scary and then building upon that skill base over time and then taking action towards getting those results.

08:05 DB: Indeed, indeed. I’d like to focus on keyword research a little bit then, if that’s okay.

08:11 EW: Yeah.

08:13 DB: In terms of starting out a brand new website, how do you go about deciding which keyword phrases are just right to target at the beginning?

08:21 EW: Well, I mean, in all of our training material and things, I like to talk about something called The 4 golden rules of keyword research. And there’s some really obvious in hindsight. Not just because it’s obvious doesn’t mean that it’s easy, and doesn’t mean that like common sense isn’t common. But I highly recommend, obviously, that even before the keyword research process, that you identify something that you’re actually passionate about, interested about, because you’re going to be spending a lot of time in this business. I remember once I started a business around weight loss products and things, and I didn’t have a lot of weight to lose and I wasn’t particularly interested in that market. So I think that’s the first one. But assuming that you’ve mostly chosen a business or a market that you might be interested in entering, then I suggest that people apply the 4 golden rules.

09:23 EW: And golden rule number one is keyword relevance. It sounds really stupid but a lot of people, they choose keywords which are not really highly-related to their product and market or might only be moderately related. And so for example if you’re trying to sell, say you’re choosing… You’re selling dog collars or something like that, a lot of people who do pay per click understand this, but the effect that they might run some ads for dog collars and they might start getting some sales might go, “Hey, this is great. How do I get more traffic and more sales?” So they go to a less relevant keyword. Or they go, “Hey, if people are buying dog collars then potentially people are searching for dog training, which has even more searches than dog collars might… Surely I’ll get more sales.” And then they advertise for dog training, and they end up losing a bunch of money because it’s not as highly targeted.

10:24 EW: There are obviously a percentage of people that are interested in dog collars that search for dog training, but it’s a much less specific kind of search. And there’s definite rule which sort of says that if you can’t make money on a very, very highly targeted keyword phrase, a buy keyword phrase specific about your product or service that you’re trying to sell, then you are not going to get better results branching out to high traffic keyword terms, you’re going to get less results. So if you can’t make money on a targeted keyword phrase then just look at something else, look at what you’re doing wrong before running around for another keyword phrase. So relevance is really, really important and going after highly targeted keyword phrases is a really good place to start as well as having a lot less competition around it. So that’s golden rule number one, which is keyword relevance.

This transcript is the second part of my Eugene Ware interview and this part focuses on external keyword tools. Remember, if you haven’t done so already make sure you download your free trial copy of Eugene’s Market Samurai.

11:20 DB: Okay. So just a quick question on that… You mentioned buyer’s keyword phrases. Does that differ according to industry or can you simply add ‘compare, buy’, your standard type terms to each keyword phrase? Or are there specific ways that you can go about researching the correct buyer phrases for each market?

11:44 EW: I think it does change around for a different market. There is certainly a level of commonality on stuff like adding the word ‘buy’ for example, if it’s “buy dog collars” or “cheap dog collars” or whatever your typical kind of buy kind of keywords. But, you know, it does change around and when I’m talking about commerciality of keyword phrases that there are definitely ways that you can quantify the commercial value of a keyword phrase. And it’s really important to focus on those highly commercial keyword phrases. First, particularly, when you’re starting out, the most important thing is to try to get any result, not just a perfect result, not to make a ton of money, but to get any result. So the… But I’ll just keep running through that before we get caught around or that kind of stuff. So there are some general modifiers and things that you can add into keyword phrases to… But, me personally, I much prefer taking a look at just the different measures of commercial value of keywords.

12:59 EW: So the second thing is then traffic, and everyone gets traffic except if they really don’t, they go hang on… People are obsessed in keyword research, I think most people, they think keyword research is traffic research; find the keywords which have a lot of traffic. And it’s that most people’s sophistication in keyword research. The things that complicate that are that most of what was reported as being traffic is actually not traffic, it’s actually searches. So Google’s own external keyword tools, all the keyword tools out there, they’re searches. So it’s the number of times that people type in a particular keyword phrase like dog collars every month and that’s different from traffic. Traffic is clicks. Traffic is stuff that physically reaches your website and so these numbers change and stuff. A number of years ago, there was a study about the percentage of people that clicks through on the number result one in a search engine and the result was around 42%.

14:09 EW: So if a particular keyword, if Google reports of this being a thousand searches a day for a particular keyword phrase, you’re not going to get a thousand people through your website if you’re number one. You’re going to get 420-ish people through to your website if you’re number one. So understanding that is… helps set the right expectations around things, but I think that most people can’t help to see, get traffic. There’s no point optimizing for a keyword that has low traffic, but it depends. It’s something like 80% of all keywords, you can pick a random keyword, 80% of all keywords just have no traffic or such low levels of traffic it’s really not worth putting the time and money into optimizing for it at all because it’s just going to waste your time. It’s not going to be a good return on time or investment in your business.

15:11 DB: But, of course, it’s an incredible difference between ranking, say, 10th in the first page of search engine results and ranking 1st in terms of the length of click through reach you actually get.

15:22 EW: Absolutely. I think if number 1 is 42%, I think number 10 is around 3%, so I think that’s like 14 times or something like that. And that’s a massive difference in traffic. So people are… There’s a big difference being number 1 and number 2, to being number 10, let alone being on the second page and often spending the time to look at what you are already ranking for and increasing those rankings is 9 times out of 10, the best thing you can do to actually put more dollars in your pocket if you’re pursuing SEO as a traffic strategy for your business.

16:03 DB: That’s a phenomenal return of investment that you’ll get just from improving your search results because a lot of people I think, think that the job is done when they see their website in the first page, but they just don’t comprehend how much more traffic you could be getting of course if they had a bit of an increase in rankings.

16:20 EW: Yeah, absolutely. And these days you can actually… We’ve got some great tools available to us like Google Analytics and things. And if you switch on some of the Google Analytics e-commerce tracking features and things so that every time that you sell something through your website, you can actually track how much money that was worth to you, then Google will start reporting on the value of each keyword phrases. So, “Hang on, this… Every click that comes through from this particular keyword phrase is worth, whatever,” $3 to you or something or 50 cents, whatever the number is. I mean, you can actually just go and take a look at what you’re already earning per keyword phrase and say, “Well, if I increase this by one position or five positions or whatever it is, how much is that worth to me?” And then just prioritizing and going after those keywords which physically make you the most money and that’s the most sensible approach to SEO. It’s always easier to improve something that’s sort of working than it is start with something that could… You completely getting no results in.

17:24 DB: That’s an excellent tip for actually targeting the buy words right for your business.

17:28 EW: Yeah. And the dollar amounts that are relevant specifically to your business not just what some… What a generic keyword tool might say. So that’s traffic. The third one which no one really talks about, and this is I guess what I was talking about before is the commercial value of that traffic. And so when you’re considering keywords to optimize your website around. Fundamentally, it doesn’t matter how much traffic and how relevant, it’s about the money. Like it’s about how much money will this keyword phrase put into your pocket. I mean, you’re starting out, you don’t know that and there’s this range of techniques you can do like you can actually bid on AdWords for that specific keyword phrase and actually measure the commercial value of that traffic through to you through website. But even before you get to that stage, there are so many thousands of keywords you can optimize for. You need to have some mechanism to measure how valuable that traffic is. And I can talk about some more specifics about that later if you like. But there are ways where you can measure the dollar value of the traffic, get some estimate and which might not be 100% accurate but allows you to compare 2 keyword phrases and is most certainly seen this in industries that I’ve been at, just even at work.

18:59 EW: A plural version of a website might be worth three times the value of the monthly version of the keyword, for example. And I said I worked in this property investing website, we did all the stuff… It wasn’t invented, it didn’t exist back when we were doing this same stuff, so we picked the keyword “property investing” so we got propertyinvesting.com then we bought that domain, it was good and we got a lot of traffic for it. And we worked out, later on, when I understood all this stuff, “Hang on, we should have… In Australia,” because there’s this specific Australian website we’re talking about, “We should have really targeted the keyword ‘real estate investing’,” because commercially, like the commercial value was something like five times the value of ‘property investing’ as a keyword. And you know it’s a three-word keyword phrase, so that’s also, it tends to be less competitive. So just a single decision that was made at the top of our head, and we turned that into $6 million a year business. It could have been five times the value, that’s $30 million a year business potentially for the same amount of traffic. Now, even if you are out by a factor of three that’s still a lot of money, and that’s the importance of measuring the commercial value of a keyword phrase. I mean, when you’re starting out you’re just trying to get runs on a board and just trying to understand this old SEO game but it is important to keep these things. And if you’ve got, in your mind, ten different keywords to optimize for people… If you got ten keywords that come up as the result of the keyword analysis and you have to pick which one to really go after then most people would probably source by traffic and could go for the high traffic keyword, me personally, I would sort by commerciality because I want the ones that could give the best return of my time and money and go after the highest commercial return given everything else as equal.

This transcript is the third part of my Eugene Ware interview and this part focuses on the keyword long tail. Remember, if you haven’t done so already make sure you download your free trial copy of Eugene’s Market Samurai.

21:05 DB: Absolutely. It’s just so easy to presume or to make assumptions as to what would be right, but probably that’s the worst road to go down if you actually made decisions based upon your own opinions of what’s likely to happen as opposed to actually look at the research and see what people actually do. All the figures are out there. It’s just getting down there and just crunching the data and just going on gut instinct, I suppose.

21:30 EW: Yeah, that’s one of the great things about internet marketing. There is a lot of empirical data out there that you can make better and informed decisions. Saying that though, it’s sort of a bit like petrol prices in that you put a number on anything, people believe, people become highly sensitive to it and overly depend on the numbers and all get stuck into analysis paralysis about things and keyword research is super important, and I certainly wouldn’t go into any business without doing it but you can also get too obsessed by it. You know what they say about imperfect action is always going to get you much better results than perfect inaction. So it’s about taking massive, spending some time learning this stuff, and understanding it, time boxing it and then so looking for it. And after, if I spent a couple of days on this, I’m going to make a decision, I’m going to go with best one that I have and because starting out, this stuff is hard.

22:34 EW: Anytime you do anything for the first time, you’re going to fail, you’re going to come across some road block and not going to get the kind of results… I mean, that’s life. So the important thing is to start taking action, start learning, fail fast, just fail small, fail fast and then actually become more familiar with these things, build up confidence. “Hey I can do this thing. I know what this stuff means, I know how to do keyword research, I know how to put up a website,” this kind of stuff. When you’re starting out there are always these hundred things that are scary and hopefully when you’re finished through, you’ve done each those things at least once so they’re not so scary then you got more confidence to go back and improve and build on those results that you’ve done. And so that’s commercial value.

23:35 EW: And the last one which is a sort of the most important one, and I believe this is where the conversation around keyword research should really be around but no one really talks about it because it’s a lot easier to talk about the other stuff, and that is around competition. There is no point, you can have the highest traffic keyword in the world, you can have the highest commercially valuable keyword in the world, and you can have the most highly targeted buy-phrase relevant keyword to your product or service. But, if the competition around that keyword in search engines is too great for you where you are today, then you’re not going to… You don’t have a hope of actually getting to the front page of Google for that keyword phrase.

24:21 EW: It’s naive to expect that you have the capacity to rank for any keyword phrase, some stuff is just really hard out there. It doesn’t mean… Any keyword phrase is attainable with enough action and expertise and resources behind you. But, the good news is that there are plenty of keyword phrases that are really easy to rank for. And so, having a way to measure competition around a keyword phrase is really, really important and this is where most people fall down. But, if they understand traffic or even these other things, but they don’t understand competition, they don’t understand how to see, measure the competition of a keyword and get a feeling for, “Can I rank for this keyword or not,” and I say this, there’s no point looking at golden rules’ number one, two or three if the competition is too high. So, that’s a very quick summary of all of the principles, the 4 golden rules of keyword research. And those are the kinds of things that people need to be thinking about when they’re starting a business.

25:34 DB: Excellent. A lot of incredible information there. Laterally, you were touching on obviously, not go for a keyword phrase that had too much competition. I remember back in about 2004 or so when I was first doing fairly well with a few web sites, I was hammering my home page for one keyword phrase, and eventually managing to get that rank in Google but that was by and large the only keyword phrase that that website was ranking for. So, this may be bringing in a thousand plus unique visitors a day, but of course, if Google suddenly turned around and decided that they didn’t want to rank the page for that keyword phrase anymore, then suddenly my traffic would have dropped down 90% or something like that. So, obviously there’s a lot more business security in there when it comes to targeting the keyword long tail. Do you want to, perhaps, talk a little about long tail and how much easier really it is for businesses to rank for those phrases and get their conversion rates?

26:38 EW: Sure, I mean… SEO always is… There’s no certainties to SEO around, putting all your eggs in one basket, putting it… Just targeting a single keyword is not a wise strategy. Putting all… Making sure that all your traffic comes from SEO is not a wise strategy. It’s about diversity and getting as many possible sources of traffic to your website as possible. But certainly, when you’re starting out, there’s a lot of risk if you’re just going after a single keyword phrase. And a long tail keyword phrase is essentially, it tends to be a multi-word keyword phrase. So, that doesn’t necessarily have such a high level of searches, but the positive features that it does have it tends to have lower competition because being a three or four word keyword phrase is not as many people have taken the time to optimize around it, so it tends to be a lot less competition around it. And also, it tends to be more relevant that a lot of the buy-keyword phrases that tends to say, “buy dog collar” or “buy dog collar San Diego” or something like that, it has a lot more keyword phrase. It’s also highly, highly specific as it can often get a lot better conversions off longer tail keyword phrases. However, the downside is that longer tail stuff, but not always the case, can have less traffic. But, you can also do a lot more, optimize around a lot more long tail keyword phrases if you’re going to take… If you had a certain budget for link building or building authority to your website, you’d probably going to get a lot better results going after ten long tail keyword phrases as opposed to one short tail keyword phrase.

The 30th edition of our podcast brings you week #2 from the original 26-Week Internet Marketing Plan. This video looks at niche long tail keyword research.

The recording is taken from our original 2007 seminar. At the time it sold for £399 as part of our 26-Week Internet Marketing Plan home study package. Now, for the first time we’re giving it away for free via our internet marketing podcast.

Why are we giving all this great video content away for free?

Although these videos still offer a lot of great tips, internet marketing methods change over time. We’re going to be launching a brand new version of the plan soon, and we’re sure that by sharing these original video recordings for free, you’ll be persuaded to jump on-board when the new paid-for version launches! Stay tuned to our newsletter to find out more.

The following post about SEO keyword research is an extract from the 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing eBook.

Keywords are the phrases that people type into search engines to find a product or service. At the very beginning you need to conduct keyword research make sure all the different pages on your website are targeting the right keywords – the phrases that people are likely to type into search engines in order to find the product or service that you offer.

The keyword phrase myth

There is a myth that the best scenario is to appear at the top of Google’s search results for a really popular word that relates to your industry. However, this is a mistake because if you’re doing this then the chances are that you are focusing on your competitors instead of your own prospective customers. The keywords that you need to focus on are the ones that provide great conversion rates for your website in addition to a reasonable amount of website visitors (traffic).

Conversion rates are measured by calculating the number of visitors to your website divided by those that go on to undertake the action required in order to reach your ultimate goal.

If you’re a college or university you may think, ‘Oh, it would be fantastic just to appear at the top of Google for the keyword search ‘college’. Not necessarily. For instance you might offer very specific courses. You obviously cover just a specific locality – and a specific price bracket. Therefore, you are not likely to get very good conversion rates from just that one word.

Another example is you may think, ‘If I offer a business articles website, wouldn’t it be fantastic just to get thousands of visitors for the keyword ‘business’? However, in this instance as well your conversion rates will suffer as the keyword ‘business’ can have a very generic meaning and as a result it is more likely that these visitors will have reached your website and not found what they were looking for.

Rather than think about single term keywords you should be focusing on succeeding with longer phrase keywords, commonly called long-tail keywords which are easier to rank highly in search engines and often lead to better conversion rates.

Long-tail keyword phrases

It is important to use what are called long tail keyword phrases from your SEO keyword research. By using long-tail keyword phrases you face less competition from similar businesses, making it easier to get ranked in search engines. Long-tail keyword phrases also give you higher conversion rates as they pull in more relevant traffic to your website, with visitors more likely to follow-through and become your customers.

By focusing on long-tail keyword phrases, relevant people who have specifically searched for what you have on offer will be visiting your website, rather than people stumbling upon your website by chance. Not only are visitors from long-tail, more relevant keyword phrases more likely to stick around and purchase from you. They’ll be more likely to bookmark your website and come back later.

Internet search patterns

Think of the patterns that people make when search for something online. Think about how you use a search engine. Do you just search once and then pick out a website from your first set of results? You are more likely to perform an initial search using just one or two words and then try and narrow down the results further after that.

This improved search is generally made by adding extra words (often determined by the initial search results) or the use of inverted commas “around a phrase” to indicate that it’s a specific phrase that you’re searching for. Most internet users are aware that the more precise your search terms are, the more likely you are to find the precise resource you’re looking for.

People are looking for something specific when they type in a longer keyword phrase into a search engine. That’s another reason why you shouldn’t necessarily worry about not coming up in the first set of search results.

The keyword phrase solution / using keyword phrases

The more keyword phrases that you are trying to aim for on a single page; the harder it is to achieve high search engine rankings for your chosen page. Do not be tempted to go for lots of different keyword phrases for your home page – you should aim for one main keyword phrase on each individual webpage plus some longer-tail keyword phrases (preferably encompassing your main keyword phrase) – up to a maximum of 3 phrases per page. Any more than 3 keyword phrases per page will dilute the impact of each of the phrases on your individual pages.

A good example would be if you had determined that your main keyword phrase for your home page should be ‘UK travel guide’ then a couple of longer tail keyword phrases that you could include on the same page without diluting their impact might be ‘free UK travel guide’ and ‘UK travel guide for tourists’.

You should also focus on different keyword phrases for different pages of your site, again up to a maximum of 3 per page. The main content on your web pages will naturally allow search engines to find alternative longer keyword phrases. That’s another reason why you should have just the one main keyword phrase as a main target as well as just a few specific longer-tail keyword phrases.

Note: Pillar #2 will review different areas on your web pages where you should be including your chosen keyword phrases.

Search engine ranking

In the 1990’s search engines like AltaVista were the most popular means of finding information on the web. At that time the meta-keywords tag was the primary factor in determining the relevance of individual pages, and where those pages should be ranked in search engines.

From roughly the year 2000 onwards, search engines started to realize that their results could be easily skewed if they focused on the meta-keywords tag too heavily. Instead of relying on this piece of meta data for ranking decisions, Google counted the quantity of links to a webpage from other websites and the text used within those links (amongst other things) when deciding on the search ranking of a web page.

The meta keywords tag has continued to drop in value as the large search engines such as Google and Yahoo! have become wise to spotting ‘keyword stuffing’. This has happened to such an extent that may search engine professionals don’t bother with it anymore.

Selecting the appropriate keyword phrase with your keyword research tool

As Google has evolved the way it ranks pages, you should review your keyword phrase strategy accordingly.

In order to implement the optimum keyword phrase strategy, using your keyword research tool in the most effective way you should use different levels of keyword phrases according to the relevance of the keyword phrase, the degree of difficulty in getting that keyword phrase ranked highly by a search engine and the structure of your website.

To help you determine the appropriate keyword phrase for each page on your website I would recommend that you think of your keyword phrases as belonging to one of three categories:

- Your home page keyword phrase

- Your category page keyword phrases

- Your keyword phrases on individual pages within your categories

Category keyword phrases explained

By category keyword phrases I’m assuming that your website is structured in a hierarchical order and therefore has a certain amount of links on the home page, and these pages that the home page links to have further links that point to additional pages. I’m referring to the pages which are linked to directly from your main pages menu as your category pages.

Helping search engines to determine the relevance of your site

By structuring your keyword phrases into different levels you are helping explain to search engines the precise relevance of your site. The means search engines are more likely to understand the meaning of your site and they will be more confident that your website is an authority on a particular topic.

You should have a separate keyword phrase for your home page, your category pages, and your individual pages within. For your home page you can afford to choose a keyword phrase that is searched more often, and which will generate more traffic to your site; category pages less so and individual pages even less so.

As a rule of thumb I tend to focus on a two-word keyword phrase for my home page, three-word keyword phrases for my category phrases and four-word keyword phrases for my individual pages.

Figure 1.1

Determining subject areas to cover on your website

One of the first areas you should address with your website is to determine your main category subject areas. A category represents subsections on your website which help search engines and visitors to determine the contents of that particular subsection of your website. I suggest having approximately 10 to 30 main categories within your site with different keyword phrases associated with each of them.

For example, if your keyword phrase on your home page is ‘golf lessons’, you may wish your category keyword phrases to include ‘london golf lessons’, ‘cheap golf lessons’ and ‘golf driving schools’. Your category keyword phrases needn’t contain exactly the same words as your home page keyword phrase, but they should be topic related – and more specific.

Researching keyword phrase categories

There are different ways of researching categories for your site and there are a number of resources you can use to help determine the most appropriate categories.

First of all, you should go to competitors’ websites and have a look to see how they are structuring their websites, taking note of any categories they have on their sites.

Secondly, you can use what is called the Google External Keyword Tool (Figure 1.1). This tool offers you suggestions and ideas for other keyword phrases associated to a smaller word or phrase that you type into it. This tool can be used for both website category ideas and keyword research.

Another available tool is KwMap – this gives you ideas based on what people type into search engines. It maps words closely related to, but not the same as, the search term. It provides a similar function to a thesaurus which is another option for researching different categories.

The best way of understanding how KwMap can help you brainstorm new website categories and keyword phrases is to have a play with the service.

Taking the guesswork out of determining keyword phrases

Having determined your categories you should then research the keyword phrases that people use to find the kind of product or service you offer. There are tools available for researching your keyword phrases. These will give you an understanding of the levels of phrases that people type into search engines. The main keyword research tool I recommend is called Wordtracker.

CASE STUDY 1 – Product-based Online Retail

Freddie Faldo is a golf shop owner with an online retail presence. Below is an example of how he can use Wordtracker to conduct his keyword research. In the first instance Freddy would type the word ‘golf’ into Wordtracker.

Wordtracker Free Keyword Research Tool - Figure 1.2

Knowing which keywords to target

It is going to be difficult for him to run at the top of search engines for the word ‘golf’ unless he puts a lot of effort in, as there is a great deal of competition for the keyword ‘golf’. View a screenshot of the Wordtracker search on the word ‘golf’ in figure 1.3.

Even if he does get to the top of search engine rankings for the keyword ‘golf’, are people looking for what he offers? Perhaps they are looking for golf courses or golf lessons rather than buying golf equipment from a local shop.

Ideally, the keyword phrase that he should be targeting for his home page is something like ‘golf equipment’ as that is specifically what he offers.

Drilling down deeper into Wordtracker results

In order to determine the keyword phrases that Freddie should be using for his category pages, he can click on the links within the Wordtracker results for golf equipment to show results such as: ‘used golf clubs’, ‘discount golf clubs’, ‘ping golf clubs’. As these are actual search phrases that people use on a regular basis they are more beneficial. They are also longer phrases and therefore more specific to Freddie Faldo’s website.

Wordtracker Search Results - Figure 1.3

He will also be able to see within these results how many times a day these phrases are searched for e.g. the phrases ‘used golf clubs’; ‘discount golf clubs’ and ‘ping golf clubs’ are typed into search engines roughly 800 times a day.

He now has an idea of how to structure his website by using the keyword phrases used ‘golf clubs’, ‘discount golf clubs’, ‘ping golf clubs’ within the category of ‘golf equipment’, back with the knowledge that there are a great deal of people that regularly search for those phrases online.

CASE STUDY 2 – Service-based Online Retail

Jane Jobs runs a Sales Executive Recruitment Company. Jane is already aware that her business is about sales jobs. But what categories should she choose for her website?

Using Wordtracker Jane can see that people type in ‘sales jobs’ 150 times a day. That is a nice level in terms of number of visitors for a keyword phrase to aim for your home page. Roughly you should aim for between 100 and 1,000 times searched for a home page keyword phrase.

Category phrases should be searched a bit less – probably something in the region of 20 to 200 times depending on the size of business or on how hard you are prepared to work at getting those pages ranked highly in search engines.

From the Wordtracker results (Figure 1.4), the different categories that she could have within her website are: “medical sales jobs” (51 searches), “pharmaceutical sales jobs” (31 searches) and “direct sales jobs” (17 searches). Jane can now be confident that these are the phrases which people are actually searching for.

Using Wordtracker to amend your website strategy

Having initially considered structuring the site keywords on a regional basis, Jane can now see that people don’t as commonly conduct regional searches e.g. ‘sales jobs Belfast’ or ‘sales jobs Newcastle’. This research therefore gives her a much better idea of how to structure her website and how to cater her offering towards the majority of potential website visitors.

Drilling down even further, she can structure different keyword phrases for her individual pages as well. By clicking on the phrase ‘medical sales jobs’, she can include these longer keyword phrases on individual pages within that category.

Examples of longer-tail keyword phrases that Jane can use on her pages within the medical sales jobs category include ‘medical equipment sales jobs’, ‘medical device sales jobs’, and ‘sales jobs medical equipment’.

Pillar #1 – Keyword Research Summary

• Structure your site correctly to begin with. You know what your business is about and what your home page is about. Make sure your keywords reflect your business purpose.
• You should aim to structure your website in a logical manner for both users and for search engines.
• After you choose your home page keyword phrase, choose your site categories. What categories represent your business? Brainstorm ideas and use resources such as an online thesaurus, KWmap, Wordtracker and the Google External Keyword Tool to come up with 10-30 relevant categories for your site.
• Focus on your individual pages after your categories. In an ideal world you should devise a structure of 10 to 30 individual pages within each category. If you want, and if your website is large enough, then you can go for sub categories within categories before drilling down to pages within that section.
• Conduct keyword research to come up with one keyword phrase per page.
• Be as specific as possible. By selecting long tail keyword phrases, even if you have fewer visitors to your site, you will have a higher conversion rate from the traffic you do receive. In the long term bringing in a couple of visitors per day to an individual page, equals 500-600 very relevant visitors over a year.
• Position your keyword phrase in your site architecture – and this is where we start Pillar #2 – Website Design.

If you haven’t done so already, download the free 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing eBook to read about Pillar #2 – Website Design.

View the entire Keyword Research Presentation below via the Slideshare website. This is an audio recording of the original 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing seminar added to the original slides.

This Keyword Research video is the first of our series of internet marketing videos which were recorded at an early version of the 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing seminar. Enjoy!

This second episode of our internet marketing podcast looks at Internet Marketing Pillar #1 – Keyword Research.

Remember, if you haven’t done so already, before going any further make sure you download the free 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing eBook which accompanies this keyword research podcast.

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Keywords are the phrases that people type into search engines to find a product or service.

At the very beginning you need to make sure all the different pages on your website are targeting the right keywords – the phrases that people are likely to type into search engines in order to find the product or service that you offer.

This podcast episode looks at:

• The keyword phrase myth
• Long-tail keyword phrases
• Internet search patterns
• The keyword phrase solution / using keyword phrases
• Search engine ranking
• Selecting the appropriate keyword phrase
• Category keyword phrases explained
• Helping search engines to determine the relevance of your site
• Determining subject areas to cover on your website
• Researching keyword phrase categories
• Taking the guesswork out of determining keyword phrases
• Knowing which keywords to target
• Drilling down deeper into Wordtracker results
• Using Wordtracker to amend your website strategy