An effective keyword strategy starts with seed list of about six words. Your list will improve as you do research. See below for a list of free tools. Take into account factors such as visitor relevance, business relevance, popularity and competition. For example, let’s look at the term training.
Visitor relevance: What percentage of folks using that search term are actually interested in what your website has to offer? The term training is very broad. Therefore the kind of training you offer is likely to be relevant to only a small segment of people searching on that term, say 5%. It is possible to improve the relevance of a search term by adding qualifiers, such as customer service training, say 50%, or customer service training program, say 75%. By refining the search term that visitors are likely to use to find exactly what you offer, the higher you can estimate your visitor relevance.
Business Relevance: How relevant is your search term to you? To simplify matters, we’ll define business relevance in terms of money – how much would you pay to get an interested visitor to your website or your customer service training program landing page? This is different from what you’d be willing to pay for any visitor. You can assign a dollar value to this search term by dividing the revenue from your customer service training programs generated by web leads by the number of visitors who find your site using this search term. Say, total revenues of $600 divided by 10 keyword visitors equals a per visit value of $60.
It is possible to improve the business relevance of a search term by increasing a site’s conversion rate on a given term. Google AdWords and Google Analytics provide this metric.
Popularity: The popularity of a search term is the number of searches in a given period across all search engines. Determining the true popularity of a search term is impossible, but there are tools that let us make a reasonable estimate. For example: according to the Google Keyword tool, the global search volume on the term customer service training program for the past twelve months was 880.
Weighted Popularity: The weighed popularity of a search term is the relevance multiplied by the popularity. So if we believe that 75% of searchers are interested in what we have to offer (relevance), and that there are 880 searches per year (popularity), the weighted popularity formula says that there are 660 (880 x 75%) targeted searches per month.
Potential Value: The potential value of a search term is the weighted popularity multiplied by the business relevance. So if we believe that there are 660 targeted searches per month, and the potential value of each visitor is $60, the potential value is $39,600 for the year, if we could somehow get all of those searchers to our website.
Competition: Understanding the competition helps define the level of effort required to get in front of searchers. Level of effort translates, on some level, into the cost of competing. Competition metrics also help us understand the degree of risk involved, or the possibility that the effort will be unsuccessful.
Free keyword research tools:
Google Adwords Keyword Tool
Google Search Based Keyword Tool
