An effective keyword strategy starts with seed list of about six words. These are words that seem to you will bring traffic. However, what seems reasonable to you, will not always be what makes sense to the people you want to find you. You can test your list by using one of the following keyword research tools.
But, you can quickly become overwhelmed by too much information from these tools. So, to help you simplify and organize your research, you can download this keyword research worksheet.
Once you have downloaded the worksheet, you can use it to improve your chances of being found by taking into account
- the relevance of your keyword to your visitors
- the keyword competition, or how many other websites are using this keyword in their content
- the relevance of the keyword to your business
For example, let’s look at each of these elements for the term training.
Popularity (Local Monthly Searches): The popularity of a search term (keyword) is the number of times people search on a term in a given period (usually per month). 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.
Competition: Understanding the number of other pages using your search term helps you understand how much and what kind of effort will be required to get out in front of other web pages.
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.
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.
Average CTR: CTR stands for Click Through Rate. This is the percentage of people who have clicked on your search listing compared to the number who have viewed it. A good number to start with is 0.1%
Expected visitors: Given the CTR, this is the number of visitors that you can reasonably expect from this keyword.
Visitor to lead conversion rate: This is the number of visitors who fill out a form on your site to request additional information. Such a form might appear on a landing page, or your Contact Us page. A good number to start with is 2%. A well optimized site can expect as high as 10%.
Value of lead: Plug in this value from your business goals worksheet.
Potential Value: The potential value of a search term is the number of leads multiplied by the value of a lead. Sort on this field, and you will have a prioritized list of keywords to work with.