I believe that categorizing keywords into the finest groupings that make semantic sense is the right way to do it; often I’ll have a category with 2, 10, or perhaps 30 keywords at the most. Later, when some of the categories are turned into actual campaigns, this tight organization and relevance will tend to pay off with higher quality scores.

Since Google Adwords takes into account the relevance of keywords to the creative, obviously grouping very diverse keywords will result in low relevance, so this is why relatively fine categorization is important.

Often, however, I find myself with too many keywords to handle; even as little as 5,000 keywords broken down into 300 categories, for instance, is still not a very manageable set.

In these cases, I like to take the keyword categories and bundle the categories themselves into a *secondary* category that represents the “funnel” stage that the keyword category belongs to.

Marketers are told to think of a customer as being in one of various “funnel” stages at any given time, and even if you’re not systematic about it, you probably already think of brand terms as being “lower funnel” and research-type terms as being “upper funnel”.

Most readers are doubtless familiar with models such as “Attention-Interest-Desire-Action”, and other 4, 5, and 6 stage funnels which are pretty standard fare for marketers.

After performing my initial keyword categorization (sort of into micro-categories), I like to categorize the categories themselves into a total of *ten* funnel stages I’ve developed, which are organized around a “problem/solution” mental model.

In Figure 1, I’ve shown individual keywords belonging to each funnel stage for a variety of B-to-C funnels. Later, Figure 2 presents some B-to-B  examples.

These keywords presented could be actual keywords, but I think they are more appropriately thought of as representing *categories* of keywords:

Figure 1 - Business to Consumer Search Funnel Stages

Ten stages may seem like a lot of detail, but organizing keyword categories into these stages:

1. Forces you to really try to understand searcher’s intent.
2. Gives you a sense of where the holes in your keyword research are from a funnel perspective.
3. Resonates with clients or management and is a great way to discuss and understand a business.

For example, after going through this exercise with one client, to my great surprise, they told me that stage 2 (“Suspicion There May Be a Problem“) was almost the sole focus of their existing marketing.

Their strategy is to pull in searchers looking for help identifying their problem, establishing them early as a trusted brand in the eyes of the searcher.  This client has found that organic and offline conversions then naturally follow. Although very much a one-trick pony approach which I would not recommend for most businesses, it works great in their market.

Below is another version of the funnel with examples that are more B-to-B oriented, for those interested in that perspective;  we’ll now run through the funnel stages, explain the thinking behind each of them, and discuss which stages you should consider addressing in your marketing mix.

Figure 2 - Business to Business Search Funnel Stages

Activity Funnel Relates To

This is a very general field of activity, and will often not be a focus of marketing efforts since the customer may not actually be experiencing a problem yet.

However, display advertising that targets field-focused websites or is demographically targeted may be a useful vehicle from a branding perspective in this stage.

Suspicion That There May Be A Problem

This funnel is focused around the mental model of problem-solving; other mental models may make for useful funnels as well, but I’ve found “problems” to be universally applicable.

In this stage, there may be symptoms described but the customer does not understand the nature of the problem, or perhaps they don’t even understand that the symptoms are a problem at all.

It’s a critical stage where you can have great influence on the direction a potential customer will take; we’ll touch on this more later.

Problem Identified

This is an interesting bucket because you may have some latent versus blatant needs that you can separate out; different types of problems may actually fork off into different funnels.

Looking For Solution Alternatives

In this stage, the prospect is trying to understand the variety of approaches available to them. There are many ways to lose weight for instance; diet, exercise, portions, surgery, and so on.

This is fairly early in the research phase and can be ripe fruit for thought leadership content (great for the SEO channel as well). If you’re really lucky and you’re the only solution to a problem (perhaps you’re in a new market) then this stage may barely even exist and prospects may jump directly from stage 3 to stage 5.

Solution Space Has Been Chosen

In this stage, the prospect has decided on a particular approach for solving the problem (for instance, “dieting” to solve a weight problem).

Complicating Issues

This stage perhaps belongs alongside the funnel, but I usually place it in the middle of the research phase. Many people with problems have complicating issues; diabetes (if they are interested in weight loss), a wheelchair-bound spouse (if they are interested in travel), and so on.

Addressing these complicating issues can be a great way of differentiating your product or service and reducing friction for a final sale.

Researching A Specific Solution

Now the prospect is getting *very* specific about a particular member of the solution space (“Low-Carb Diets” in the case of a Weight Loss/Dieting funnel for instance).

Researching A Specific Brand

At this stage, the prospect is getting very serious and is educating themselves about specific providers.

Remember, brand terms are well known in the industry to convert at a higher rate as generic terms (twice the rate on average in my experience), so addressing this funnel stage should be a critical component of any online marketing effort.

Conversion Imminent

Terms that include phrases like “coupon code”, “pricing”, “cheap”, are akin to flashing red lights with a siren screaming “transaction about to occur!!!”

Spending a lot of time building out variations in this funnel section is usually well rewarded. Google Suggest is a great place to find ways that potential customers are raising their hands in these ways.

Post Conversion

Often, a neglected funnel stage, this is where you will find customers searching for things like “repairs”, “replacement parts”, “add-ons”, “upgrades”, “warranties”, and “support”.

You may or may not have offerings that address concerns in this funnel stage, but it’s important to think about them.

If you’re a travel company, trip insurance may not be something your customers will actively seek out often, and paid search campaigns targeting that concept may not be worthwhile.

If, however, your paid search keyword research turns up the concept, and you then prompt your company to put together some sort of revenue-sharing deal with a trip insurance provider to integrate their product into your cart, I would say the time spent researching funnel stage #10 was well worth it.

Which Stages Should You Target?

As most articles you’ve read on this topic probably state, you should target all of them. This is not very helpful advice though – often in marketing we have to prioritize our efforts.

If I absolutely had to prioritize the top ones to focus on initially, I would say #9, #8, #5, and #2 in that order.

Funnel Stages #8 and #9, “RESEARCHING A SPECIFIC BRAND” and “CONVERSION IMMINENT” are self-evidently critical; how are you going to leverage this great funnel if you don’t catch potential customer at the end of it?

I am, however, a big believer in avoiding cannibalization from organic search conversions, so my preference is to consider targeting competitor brand terms  before I would work on cannibalizing my own.

Funnel Stage #5, “SOLUTION SPACE HAS BEEN CHOSEN” is square in the middle of the research phase, and catches customers who are partially educated on the problem and are still early enough in the funnel to nudge in your direction.

Funnel Stage #2, “SUSPICION THERE MAY BE A PROBLEM” is important because it’s an opportunity for you to disturb the prospect’s equilibrium, a critical step in any sales process.

Much like Don Draper stated in his famous “Carousel” pitch about the term “new”, with problem defining keywords, you “create an itch, and simply put your product in there as a sort of ‘calamine lotion’”. Funnel step #2 is essentially the “itch” stage.

This stage, where the potential customer suspects but does not yet fully understand that they may have a problem, is a powerful leverage point for influencing searchers in your direction. Think of searchers as meteors, heading for earth – a slight nudge much earlier in their trajectory can have as much influence as a strong shove later in the funnel.

Conclusion

Very fine categorization of keywords can be helpful in ascertaining customer intent, organizing your efforts, and suggesting actual paid search campaigns you might run.

I have found these ten funnel stages in particular are a convenient and useful way for me to organize very large numbers of refined categories of keywords, derive insights from them, and create campaigns targeting various phases of the sales funnel.

If anyone has any other useful mental models for constructing a funnel besides the “problem/solution” approach I’ve presented here, or any thoughts on which funnel stages to prioritize and how – by all means, comment below.

Don’t bother to go look that up in Google, as I think I’m the only one in the world who calls it that. But it helps me to think of keywords as “seeds” of information that will eventually grow into a “garden of possibilities”, if you will allow me the artistic license. I’ve been reading a lot of classic literature lately.

I received many emails from readers (Thank you!) who didn’t exactly follow my logic, so I wanted to wrap up the process as clearly and briefly as possible… and brevity is not my strong suit, nor is good keyword research ever brief.

Understanding The Questions To Ask

To begin with, you need to make sure you understand the industry you’re working with. If it’s your own site you are researching, what you need to focus on is getting past the jargon and trying to determine how your site appears to someone outside the industry.

If you’re working for a client, chances are that you can provide a lot of insight into the layman’s terms, but may not know the jargon. You need both in your research, so working with someone in this stage can be very helpful. See 5 Questions to Streamline your Keyword Research.

Identifying The Top Level Topics

Once you start doing research, you’ll probably discover that the “keyword universe” is broader and more diverse than you ever realized. Your job at this point is to identify the primary topics or “seeds” of research. See The Keyword Research Rabbit Hole for an example of how to do this.

Expanding & Growing Keyword Seeds

For each topic you identify, you’ll need to conduct the entire research process defined in Tips for Growing Keywords with Excel Formulas. An important point of clarification here is that this article goes through an example of just one keyword seed (deck) and how to expand it.

You will need to repeat the process for each of the topics you defined in the previous step. Some topics will expand to a list of hundreds of keywords, and some will expand to only a few dozen keywords. The “deck” example is one that can expand astronomically (I ended up with over 1000 keywords for that one), but not all of your topics will expand that much.

Planning & Mapping Keywords

As counter-intuitive as it may seem, once you’ve expanded the keywords to the point where you think your head might explode from all the pressure, you have to contract them again.

The goal is to understand the entire universe of keywords around a topic so that you can identify which keywords are most valuable to you. The most important part of this step is the mapping; you’ll quickly be able to see where you have content that matches and where your content is lacking. See How to Develop a Keyword Plan for more on this.

By the time you finish this last step, you should have a “tree” (there I go with the seed metaphor again) of information that conceptually looks something like the below.

In reality, it will probably be an excel spreadsheet full of categories and keywords. I personally put each category on a separate tab, but whatever works for you is fine.

Time, Averages & Other Arbitrary Numbers

One question I got asked a lot in the reader feedback was how long it takes to do keyword research like what I’ve outlined. The real answer is that it’s up to you, but I spend about 10 hours on average for an average size site.

That number can change of course, if you have a site with thousands of products, or if you have several different target markets you need to appeal to. If you have an overwhelming number of products, it may help you to work on a few categories at a time, rather than trying to cover the whole spectrum at once.

What Tools Do I Use?

I personally use the Google Keyword Tool more than anything else available, but there are dozens of good keyword tools (paid and free) as well as different strategies that you can use to decide what keywords to target.

After Google’s recent announcement of match type changes, I’ve decided to demo several tools I am not as familiar with, so that I can do a review of those along with the ones I already like using. Stay tuned, and let me know in the comments if there are any you want me to consider demo’ing.

In her discussion group for Norwegian school moms, one parent suffered from stomach cramps just like she did, and mentioned the diagnosis of “milk allergy“.

“Could this be what I have, too?” Marthe wondered, and decided to find out. So she ran a search on Google.

But like hundreds of potential customers of TINE, a Norway-based company that sells milk, Marthe was influencing the outcome by choosing a specific keyword. The search results point at websites that explain milk allergy, listing the symptoms and treatment options – among them, becoming 100% milk-free.

Where’s the problem? TINE is adversely affected by this search because there is a related condition called “lactose intolerance“, and many people like Marthe don’t know that there is a difference. But there is – and it’s very big.

If she had searched using the term “Laktoseintoleranse”, Marthe would have found different information – and avoided an incorrect diagnosis.

Hundreds of mothers throng Google because they want the best for their children. What they find in search listings, on forums and blogs, and on other online sources, will impact the way they think, share and act.

The information they find, even if wrong or misleading, gets shared in dinner-table conversation, or in casual chit-chat with friends. Myths spread like ripples in a pond, and affect behavior. Stopping myths, and factual untruths that adversely impact sales, is an important strategic move for any business – and SEO plays a vital role in it.

How Keywords, Content & SEO Can Shape Societal Shifts

How can a company selling milk prevent buyers from deciding to stop buying milk, recommending that others stop drinking milk, and spreading wrong information about milk on the Internet where Google will find it, index it and present it to others seeking this information? The answer is SEO.

Companies must fight myths with the correct information. Starting with keyword analysis to uncover the most frequently used search terms, a company like TINE might spotlight the 2 related keywords – “Melkeallergi” and “Laktoseintoleranse” – and design optimized landing pages to present the right facts.

When these landing pages rank in the top 3 results on Google, where +35% of all clicks go, this straightforward information backed by research and proof can nip in the bud any confusion and misunderstanding about milk allergy.

In one swoop, this strategy would prevent the loss of prospective customers who might otherwise have given up drinking milk completely, believing in a wrong diagnosis and cure.

In a competitive environment where milk consumption overall is going down, and milk companies are struggling with newcomers who are offering substitutes for milk and milk products, like yoghurt and cheese, plugging these “sales leaks” can make the difference between a thriving business and one that struggles for survival.

Just like any other business in any industry, a company like TINE faces the irksome problem of unique myths spreading in the community such as these:

• Milk rots inside the body
• Milk interferes with a child’s concentration at school
• Milk is for cows, not humans

Against this must be set the undoubted benefits of drinking milk, such as the high protein content that helps build muscle, and the rich source of calcium that strengthens bones.  These advantages can be showcased and promoted to a large audience through intelligent and strategic SEO.

How Keyword Selection Impacts The Content & SEO Strategy

Keyword analysis with the Google Keyword Tool can uncover the words most often employed by search engine users. By optimizing their site to rank well for these terms, a company could dominate the front page of search results, pulling people to their landing pages where the information is presented correctly and convincingly.

A content development strategy rooted in keyword research will help the company achieve business goals, both in the short and long term.

Even if the absolute numbers of search volumes are small (for example, “laktoseintoleranse” only gets 1,600 searches per month, and “melkeallergi” barely half as many), these keywords are not “long tail” but are critically important search terms for a business like TINE.

This strategy must also be viewed from a broader and creative perspective. While information about milk allergy and lactose intolerance may not immediately influence more people to buy more milk right away, it might influence how mothers write in forums, or how journalists spin a well-researched article, or how a teacher or opinion leader thinks, writes or talks about these conditions.

It will have a far-reaching impact while stopping the spread of harmful lies. That’s why the next time Marthe fires up Google to look for information, she must find TINE’s fact-laden informative website at the top!

To do this, the site presenting the facts should rank high. They must own the top spots in search engine results for specific search phrases.

In this way, SEO can help with reputation management and brand protection, and become a defense strategy, an attack plan and a business development tool, all rolled into one.

These additional content ideas should help improve organic visibility and can potentially help increase conversions on a website. In this article, I’ve included some user generated content ideas as well as some ideas most useful for ecommerce sites. As with the previous ideas, much of this content can be promoted via your various social networks.

1.  User Generated Content: Forums

You’ve seen forums on the Web such as help or discussion forums. There are forums for just about any topic, such as technical topics, health, food, games, travel and more.

A search engine friendly forum, ideally hosted on your main site, adds user generated content and often makes a site more useful at the same time. Plus, forum posts can do very well in the search results for questions people ask in search engines.

Run a search on questions about Google AdWords, Photoshop, or Dreamweaver for example, and you’ll almost certainly see listings from the provider’s help forums.

What if you’re not the provider of the product or service? It may still be worth considering a forum. Yes, the provider’s forum will likely reach the highest positions, but you may be able to reach reasonably high positions too. When I’m looking for answers for AdWords or Photoshop for example, I usually look at any listing from the provider, but I often check out answers from other forums too, where I may learn about what they offer while I’m on the forum.

Sell Yourself

As I mentioned in the past articles, it helps to use a webpage template that makes it easy for people to see what you what offer while they are viewing related content on your site. You can also make people aware of products or services with messages in your page columns and perhaps a short overview about what you offer at the end of the page with links to products or services, etc.

2.  User Generated Content: Videos & Images

You can ask your site visitors and/or social media connections to submit images or videos to publish on your site, perhaps of them using your products. As we talked about in the previous article, surround videos with overview messages and ideally include a full transcript. Surround images with text descriptions and include relevant keywords. (Here are some SEL articles about optimizing images.)

3.  User Generated Content: Ask For Feedback & Questions

Similar to the previous topic about videos and images, you could ask for feedback, suggestions/ideas, and perhaps ask about creative ways your products are being used and publish the responses. You might run a contest to help entice people to submit.

4.  User Generated Content: Article Submissions From Readers & Customers

You could also ask your site visitors and social connections for article submissions such as case studies, how they use your products or service, how-to articles, maybe interesting or humorous uses of your product. Publish these on your site, maybe in your blog, perhaps also on some of your social media venues.

5.  User Generated Content: Reviews

Allowing customer reviews for products, and in some cases services, adds unique, user generated content to a site and can help increase conversion rates at the same time (if the reviews are mostly good of course).

Try Amazon’s approach. They include a number of reviews on product pages where people looking at the product will find them easily which can help the conversion rate. This also helps makes the page more unique which is a typical problem for many ecommerce sites that sell the same products as sold by numerous other websites, often using the same manufacturers’ descriptions.

Amazon also includes a “read all the reviews” link on their product pages that opens another page, or more, with all of the reviews. This gives them at least two pages available to be returned in searches for the product or returned in searches for reviews of the product.

Notice they even ask for reviews of the reviews! Under each review they ask “Was this review helpful to you?” This allows them to show the most helpful reviews first which makes the site even more useful.

6.  Rewrite Manufacturer Descriptions

Do you sell product or services from providers who furnish descriptions? Make your descriptions unique by rewriting them if possible. This can help with search engine results and make your site more useful than the other sites selling the same products. Rewriting descriptions can be a huge effort for a large site, but you might start with some important products.

Whether you rewrite the manufacturers’ descriptions or not, it can help to surround your product descriptions with as much unique useful content as possible. See the next topic for more on this.

7.  Add More Extensive Product Information, Images, Video

Adding your own unique content to product pages such as user reviews, your own commentary, snippets of your helpful articles (with links to the full article), your own helpful videos and images should not only help increase conversions, it will likely help with search results by making your product pages unique from all the others selling the same products. Plus, including additional content on product pages may get your pages returned in more search results.

For many products, the Gun Dog Supply site, for example, includes much more product information and images than their competitors who carry the same products and often publish only what is provided by the manufacturer.

Here’s an example of a “SportDOG NoBark SBC-10R” product. When I search on “SportDOG NoBark SBC-10R”, the Gun Dog Supply site comes up next after a listing from Amazon and some Google Product Search samples.

Search on “The SportDOG NoBark SBC-10R is a rechargeable bark control collar” (without including the quotes). This is a snippet of unique text that looks like it’s provided by the manufacturer as I see it on a number of sites. Take a look at some of the other sites in the search results.

Notice the amount of unique messaging and images on the Gun Dog Supply page. The Gun Dog Supply page reached higher rankings than most others for this search, even though the exact phrase doesn’t even appear on their page. (You will get different results if you include quotes around the phrase. In that case, you are telling the search engine that you are looking for instances of the exact phrase. Since the exact phrase doesn’t appear on the Gun Dog Supply page it won’t be returned in those search results.)

Next, I searched Google (using a different browser so there would be no recent history) for “dog collar for temperament learning”. I don’t know if many people actually search for this phrase but for me, the Gun Dog Supply page came up as the number 2 Google organic result.

The Gun Dog Supply site is doing very well against most of the similar specialty ecommerce sites. Pages from the site are appearing in the top search results along with some of the national players like Amazon and a couple of large national pet store chains.

Adding unique content and ideally rewriting manufacturer provided descriptions helps make product pages more helpful to shoppers and makes the page unique which should improve rankings. Plus, the additional unique messages may get your product pages found in more meaningful searches.

Side Bar: Want a hint from Google about how product descriptions may help with organic search results? I recently watched a video from Google, 5 common mistakes in SEO (and 6 good ideas!). In one section of this video, the speaker talks about things to emphasize on your ecommerce site.

Among the expected differentiators of “low prices”, free shipping, customer service, languages spoken, and your value proposition, she included “Detailed product descriptions” (see the slide from the Google presentation below). Again, this was a Google presentation on SEO, perhaps a subtle hint from Google?

Ecommerce differentiators from Google SEO Video. “Detailed product descriptions” , Perhaps a hint from Google?

8.  Buyer’s Guides

Rob Snell has written about his family’s Gun Dog Supply ecommerce site here on Search Engine Land, focusing mostly on the improvements in conversion rates they’ve seen by helping shoppers make buying decisions with helpful content such as buyer’s guides.

Content such as buyer’s guides can also help with search results by adding content to the site which focuses on keywords your competitors may not focus on, such as the keywords used when people are in earlier stages of the shopping process; the “discovery” phase, learning about product options.

For example, here’s a Dog Collar Buyer’s Guide. It includes a “how they work section”, a FAQ section, and help on how to choose the correct tracking system for your needs.

This buyer’s guide includes content that may be returned in search results for search queries that people in earlier stages of the shopping process might search for such as “how do dog tracking collars work”, “what dog tracking collars are there?” “How do I pick the right dog tracking system?”

Most ecommerce sites only focus on the specific products they carry on their sites. So they may do well for searches when people have made a buying decision and are searching to find who carries the specific product such as a “Garmin Astro 320”.

However, many ecommerce sites don’t do well for the search queries shoppers use in the early stages of shopping because they don’t include content on the site that might be returned in search results for these queries.

By adding buyer guides, you not only add content that may bring in more shoppers in the earlier shopping stages, your buyer’s guides may help these shoppers choose what to buy while they are on your site, leading to higher conversion rates.

In addition, buyer’s guides are the type of useful content that you should be able to promote via your social media venues and with online other marketing tactics.

9.  Training Courses

Are you an expert on a topic? You could develop and sell training courses on your site. This could lead to revenue from the sale of the training courses and help highlight your expertise on your website.

Include enough of an overview that people searching for training courses or asking for help on the topic may see your courses in search results. You might even consider giving the courses away for free as a download in exchange for contact information so you can add them to your email marketing system.

If you’ll forgive me, I’ll continue the planting analogy for categorizing and mapping keywords. It seems appropriate, with spring upon us. You’ve found your seeds, planted them in little cups, and gotten seedlings from them. Now it’s time to plant them in the garden and watch them grow.

But just as you shouldn’t drop a bunch of seedlings into the ground in no particular order, you have to have a plan for your keywords as well.

Keyword Categories are like Garden Plans

In case you aren’t familiar with planting, I’ll digress briefly to explain. When you plant seedlings, you need to plant them in groups according to how much sun they need and how aerated the soil should be. You also want the plants to be visually appealing when they grow, so they need to be spaced appropriately and you’ll want to have a plan for how tall they grow and what colors they’ll be at maturity. It is actually the same with keywords.

Keep in mind while you do research that these “search volumes” that you retrieve (whether it’s from Google or some other source) are just estimates. The values are useful for determining trends and relative volume, but should never be used to estimate expected traffic.

What’s That Mean?

To begin with, you’ll need to think about what your keywords really mean. Don’t sort them into groups too early based on something arbitrary like what word they contain.

For example, don’t sort real estate keywords into “house” and “home” type keywords. Sort them according to what they mean. For example, you might have keywords that people use when they are looking for a house/home that is new construction vs. people who are looking for a house/home that is in an “established neighborhood”.

You might still have another set of keywords for people looking for townhouses or apartments. Seem too granular? It’s really not.

Patterns Take Practice

To categorize effectively, look for patterns in the way that people search. Are they looking for a specific type of something, or do they seem concerned with style, color, features? Is there a local component to their searches?

It’s actually easier to do this if you’re working on your own site because you know the subject matter so well. But if you are helping a customer, you’ll need to take time to get familiar with the subject matter first. The more you do keyword research, the better instincts you’ll have.

As you sort keywords and determine categories, make sure you do a quick search for anything that you aren’t 100% sure what it means. Put the keyword into Google or Bing and look at the results.

Do these seem like your customers? Are your competitors showing up? There’s nothing worse than wasted effort on a keyword that won’t convert to visitors and customers.

If you find a keyword like this, take an extra minute to go back and take out any similar keywords. Keep in mind that you might change categories a couple of times as you get more familiar with the patterns. It’s always better to start with too many categories and consolidate them later than to go back and re-categorize one that was too broad.

Questions Are The Key To Great Content

As you categorize the keywords in this way, keep an eye out for questions that people are asking about the topic. This is a great opportunity for you to create more content on your website later that specifically meets searchers’ needs, or to change existing content so that it more exactly matches the search terms that you found.

After you have everything sorted, take a look at the estimated volumes and make sure that they match what you expected.

For example, do more people search for “washers”, or “washing machines”? Does that match how you refer to them on your website? If “washing machines” as the technically correct keyword is searched less often than “washers”, are there ways you could work references to “washers” onto your site also?

Draw A Keyword Map

The last step is to look at the categories to see how they correspond with pages on your site. Are there perfect or near-perfect matches? Go ahead and match those up and optimize those pages for the corresponding keywords.

Are there keyword categories that don’t match anything you have on your site? Make a quick editorial calendar of content to create. Prioritize the content however you want; you might choose to do the highest profit margin areas first, or the areas where you currently have the lowest traffic, or you might even have a seasonal product/service that it makes sense to write about first. This editorial calendar will help you continue to create relevant, interesting, keyword rich content over time.

Don’t worry about creating all of the content at once; even one new piece of content per month can make your site more attractive to search engines. As you create the content, don’t forget to add it to your Google/Bing sitemaps.

Done & Done, Or Are You?

Now you have a great list of keywords that are categorized by customer intent and mapped to the right content. You even have an editorial calendar of content that needs to be created, which keeps your website fresh and interesting over time (a key component to great ranking).

So you’re done, right? Nope. You’ll need to refresh this research periodically, because people change the way they search for things over time. You’ll also want to refer back to this research each time you create a new page or add a new product or service. But it will be much easier next time, since you won’t have to start from scratch.

And that’s the seed method of keyword research! If you’re reading this out of order, be sure and go back to the other articles in the series:

• 5 Questions To Streamline Your Keyword Research
• The Keyword Research Rabbit Hole
• Tips For Growing Keyword Seeds With Excel Formulas

Photo from http://gardenthemedwedding.com. Used under Creative Commons license.

1.  Surveys

If you have a decent amount of visitors to your website or a number of connections in one or more of your social networks such as LinkedIn or Facebook, you can run surveys and publish the results on your website along with your commentary.

There are plenty of survey tools available including surveyGizmo.com and surveymonkey.com. Both LinkedIn and Facebook have survey tools that you can use on those sites. Constant Contact has a survey tool you can use to embed a survey within an email so you can email your clients, vendors, prospects etc and invite them to take a survey.

Every two years, for example, SEOmoz compiles and publishes a SEO Industry Survey on their website. Once it is published on their site, they announce that the results are available via their social networks, etc. Take a look at it.

Notice they allow others to republish the survey results if they link back to the original survey on their site. Because the value of this survey’s results and SEOmoz’s large following, this survey gets mentioned, shared, and reposted tens of thousands of times (including an article about it here in Search Engine Land).

2.  Original Research

Surveys could be considered original research, but now we’re talking about extensive primary research. Developing original research can be time consuming and expensive, often requiring the contracting of a research/marketing firm to generate.

However, this type of research can be very valuable to your market. It’s the type of content that many people may share, bookmark, link to etc. This is especially true if you update the research periodically which helps to build up an audience over time.

Shop.org’s State of Retailing Online developed with Forrester Research, for example, has been published for 10 years and as they say it’s become the “definitive report on the growth, realities, and metrics of the business of retailing online”.

As with surveys, you could publish your original research on your web site and state that it’s ok to reproduce the results if they include a link back to the original source.

TIP: Sell Yourself

I mentioned this in the last article, but I’ll repeat here. Many people who view content such as we’re been talking about will not be looking for the products or services you offer at that moment. Do the best job you can to unobtrusively let people know what you offer as they look at the content on your website.

For example, use a webpage template that makes it easy for people to see what you what offer. You can also make people aware of products or services with messages in your page columns and perhaps a short overview about what you offer at the end of the page with links to products or services, etc.

3.  FAQ’s

What questions are you often asked about your products or services? You might write articles that answer some of those questions as we talked about in the previous article, but also consider a FAQ section on your site. A Frequently Asked Questions section may help increase organic visibility and it should help you with customer service and make your web site more useful.

If you have a fair number of questions and the answers will be fairly long, then look into developing a system where the questions are on one page and the question is repeated along with the answer on a separate page. This should help improve search results by focusing on each topic separately on a page and within the HTML page title.

4.  Online Press Releases

We employ online press releases to help get the news out about newsworthy topics to industry journalists and related websites, to help build up links to a site (when others republish or mention the press release on their sites), and to put positive news stories about clients on the Web that are often returned in search results.

Online press releases add content on the Web, both on the press release site and any site that republishes the press release for some length of time. Once you have published a few press releases, you can publish them on your own website, possibly as a part of an Online Newsroom (see the next section).

5.  Online Newsrooms

An online newsroom is a section of a website where you host and keep up to date your news stories and press releases as well as summaries of positive mentions about you in the news (with links to the full story).

You could go much further and put anything that you might want others, such as the media, investors, prospects etc, to have easy access to including photos and videos (include mention of your republishing T’s & C’s), financials, company info (and links to other useful company info around your site).

Search for “Online Newsroom” for more tips and online newsroom applications you can use. Test any of these applications by examining them on other web sites to make sure they are search engine friendly so that the content will get indexed.

6.  Newsletters

Old school? Not at all. Having a newsletter that is sent via email is an excellent way to keep in touch with current clients and prospects, etc. Newsletters also offer an opportunity to add content to your website. After a newsletter is sent out, you can add the content to a section on your website. This content will likely get indexed by search engines and appear in search results.

It’s best if you can include an HTML version of your newsletters each contained within a webpage template that makes it easy for people to see what you what offer. As mentioned before, you can make people aware of your products or services with messages in your page columns, etc.

You could include PDF versions of your newsletters on your website. If you do host PDF’s, consider taking the time to optimize them as this can improve your search engine results. See Optimizing PDFs for Search Engines. It’s a few years old but still valid. You’ll learn about including active links to your website within your PDF’s so that people can click through to your site from PDF’s they find in search results. These active links may also help rankings and click throughs if other web sites republish your PDF’s.

7.  Resource Guides

As a part of the link building process, we look for resource guides so we can ask to have our websites added to them. You could develop a resource guide on your own website that outlines related information and related helpful websites.

If your business provides a service for people when they are moving, for example, you could create a resource guide outlining helpful information and many of the other products and services people need when they are preparing to move.

Include your own, unique summaries for many of the resources in your guide and maybe talk about what you find useful for the resources when you can. Your resource guide may be returned in search results as people are searching for the products, services and information you include in you resource guide and these people may learn about what you offer.

8. Videos & Podcasts

I mentioned “How to Videos” in the last article, but let’s talk about videos in general as they can be used to add content to your site as well as be hosted on many other venues where they may be found in search results. You can develop videos for an almost unlimited number of topics including company, product or service overviews, instructions, testimonials, helpful information, snippets from seminars, and much more.

We often put videos on client websites where they usually help improve conversions. When appropriate, we also put the videos in the client’s YouTube channel and their local listing sites if local marketing is a factor for them (such as Google Places and the local directories that allow videos). You can even include videos in the Products/Services section of a LinkedIn Company page. We announce most videos via the client’s social media networks.

The day is coming, quicker than we might think, when search engines will be able to do a reasonable job of extracting information from the speech embedded within video and audio files, but until then, optimize your videos as best you can by including descriptions of what is in the video and full transcripts when appropriate. (See the previous article, the section on “Learning Centers, How To Articles, Videos” for an example of a search engine friendly tab system one company uses to include the transcript for their videos.)

If you participate in podcasts or other audio production (such as online radio etc), check the copyrights to see what you’re allowed to do. If you’re allowed to host them yourself then you could add them to your website, or links to them hosted elsewhere, surrounded with descriptive information about them and ideally the full transcript. They’ll likely get found in some searches.

A well formatted and complete description or the full transcription of a video or audio file can be helpful to site visitors. When I see what looks like a helpful video (or audio) I often don’t take the time to watch the video, at least at first. Instead, I scan the overview or transcript. I may get all I need without watching the video. At other times, the overview or transcript may convince me to watch the video.

There’s quite a bit more you can do to optimize your videos, try a site search on SEL for “optimize video”.

9. Transcripts Of Speeches

Do you participate in speaking engagements such as conferences, seminars, etc? They are often recorded (or you might be able to record them yourself). Check the copyrights.

You might be able to include the recording or snippets on your site surrounded with descriptive information and/or the full transcript.

10. Slideshows

Do you create slideshows to use in your videos or for your speaking engagements? Then consider putting those slide shows up the Web. I’ve found helpful slideshows in keyword searches that were hosted on Slideshare.net.

As you should when developing HTML webpages, use the text tools as much as you can rather than including messages in images so that the text gets indexed.

Hey look, the White House uses Slideshare. Here’s President Obama’s State of the Union address. I wonder if that was up before he talked? I wouldn’t have had to stay up so late!

Stay tuned. I’m going through years of projects to compile more content ideas.

Germinating your Keyword Seeds

Using the example of Artisan Construction Services again (thanks!), we’ll walk through the process that I use to grow a single seed.

In this case, let’s use “deck”. To begin with, I want to think of the types of decks my client might build:

• Composite
• Wood
• PVC
• Hardwood
• Cedar

Then I am going to use what we learned about the client already to develop a list of verb modifiers:

• Build
• Building
• Builder
• Replace
• Replacement
• Replacing
• Construct (wait, I’m not going to use that one, see below)
• Constructing (not this one either)
• Construction

I was able to generate the list above based on conversation with the client and a working knowledge of the deck building industry. If you’re not familiar with your client’s industry, you may want to research this more – look at forums, the discussions part of Google Search, and Yahoo Answers, for example.

Categorize Keywords By Intent

After I build my list of modifiers, I go back and think about intent. I’m not going to use “construct” or “constructing” as modifiers because I think the intent behind them is DIY. Construction probably has some DIY in it as well, but it might glean several useful keywords. I’ll make a note to filter those after the fact.

By the way, don’t go above 10 total modifiers; it gets to be too much to work with.

Since the focus of this post is how-to research, I won’t go into all the modifier sets I’d use, but normally, after I did this set, I’d go back and do one for decking and maybe also for specific brands (Azek, Nichiha, etc.) When you do this for yourself, keep in mind that de-duplication will be important (see below).

Concatenation

(Yes, it is a word, and a useful one for search!)

Next, I use a tool like the one found here to concatenate (that means put together) the keyword seed with the modifiers. I prefer not to use the “concatenate” function in Excel, because sometimes it is limiting. I also find this formula to be infinitely easier to remember and manipulate:

Let’s say you have the following cells:

You want to get the phrase [build composite deck] out of this. Use the formula A1&“ ”&B1&“ ”&C1.

The &“ ”& just adds a space between the two cells’ values. If you want to lock down a value, as in the list below, so that you could get the phrase [building wooden deck]:

Use the formula the same way as above, but lock out C1 with dollar signs: A2&“ ”&B2&“ ”&$C$1.

You can “lock out” either a Row or a Column value.

Ok. If you haven’t already clicked to open the spreadsheet I mentioned above, do it now. This will show you my initial list of keywords based on the modifiers I listed above.

Notice that because I didn’t use all 10 possible modifiers, my actual keyword list ends at line 40. Just don’t use the incomplete keywords at the bottom.

Getting Search Frequencies

Go to the Google Keyword Tool. Login if you have an Adwords account; it saves you from having to enter the captcha for each search.

Cut and paste the first section of keywords from your list into the keywords field. Make sure the box that says “only show ideas closely related to my search terms” is NOT checked. Click the box on the left for “exact match” (and turn off “broad”).

Google Keyword Tool Settings

After you click “Search” and get a list of results, don’t even look at them. Just click the “download – all – CSV for Excel” link.

Repeat these steps for each modifier, but when you get the CSV’s for the other modifiers, paste them into the original Excel sheet so that you have one big list of keywords in one Excel sheet.

Once you have your full list, you need to de-duplicate.

Steps to De-duplicate

1. Make sure all of your data is in the same format. I like to find and replace (CTRL-h) all of the brackets with nothing. Find=[, Replace=nothing (leave it blank). Then repeat with “]”.
2. Sort by global monthly searches ascending. Delete any rows where global monthly searches are “0” or “-“.
3. Now sort by Keyword A-Z.
4. Go to Data – Remove Duplicates. Specify (check) only the “Keyword” Column. If you’re using an older version of Excel, it’s a little harder to do this – see these instructions to de-duplicate.

Removing 0-Value Keywords

Now we’re going to look for keyword patterns. The first obvious one I see is “how to”. Anyone using the word “how” is not interested in paying a contractor (at least not at this time).

1. Use the following formula in Column E: =FIND(“how”,A2). This will “find” anywhere in A2 that has the text string “how” and return the character position it starts at. Trust me, this is useful.
2. Now copy/paste the formula all the way down your list.
3. Select Col E and copy it.
4. Paste special for values only in Col F.
5. Sort Col F. ascending.

This brings all of the keywords with “how” to the top of the list. Simply delete out these rows, and then look for another pattern.

Hint: to easily look for another pattern, just select all of Col E and find/replace the string you’re looking for (example “how”) with the next one you need (example “design”).

When you think you’ve removed as much as you can, you will probably be down to under 100 keywords. These are the ones you really care about. Take just a minute to scroll through the completed list to make sure you didn’t miss anything and delete it.

Rinse and repeat as necessary. It takes a lot less time to do it than to explain it. You may also enjoy these easy PC/Excel shortcuts:

Shift+space bar = select an entire row

CTRL+- (that’s the minus sign) = delete an entire row

CTRL+h = open the find and replace window

ALT+e, then s, then v = copy and paste special for values only

Next time: Categorizing and mapping keywords.

Photo (http://www.women24.com/HomeAndAway/Gardening/Growing-seedlings-20090216) from Abalimi Bezekhaya.

In this and some future articles, we’ll cover adding new content to a website as well as other web venues to improve organic visibility.

When we work on a comprehensive marketing project for a client, we first learn about their business and then discover what marketing tactics their competitors have employed.

At the same time, we learn what web venues are available to focus our marketing towards.

Next, we develop a strategy that includes many tactical options including content for their site and other web venues, social marketing, referral site development and link building, etc.

Together, we decide which of the tactics to begin deploying.

Keyword Research

Quite a bit of our content ideas for a specific client are developed as we do keyword research. We look for queries that are very related to our clients’ topics, the products and services they offer, the markets they serve, etc. We also look for somewhat related queries and the questions people ask such “How Do You xxx” and “What is XX” that we might focus on with new content.

Here then are the first 10 content ideas.

1.  Content About Related Information

As I mentioned when we do keyword research we look for related queries and the questions people ask.

For example, we worked on a website for a large, high-end camping and RV resort located in one of the entertainment centers of the southeast USA. Our keyword research showed that many people were searching for activities and events in the area.

So we suggested they develop a search engine friendly directory of area events and activities, kept up to date on their website. People who click through to these listings in search results also learn about the camping resort.

Tip: Sell Yourself On These Pages

People who view content that answers questions or provides information related to your products or services etc may not looking for what you offer at that moment. Do the best job you can to unobtrusively let people know what you offer as they look at this type of content on your website.

For example, use a webpage template that makes it easy for people to see what you what offer. You can also make people aware of products or services with messages in your page columns and perhaps a short overview about what you offer at the end of the page with links to products or services, etc.

Here’s another example of providing related information on a website. I was planning a trip to a few countries in Africa. I searched on passport and visa requirements for those countries and found a nice easy to use database with passport and visa requirements for every country in the world. It was hosted by a travel company that offers package trips to many countries around the world.

While people use that database, they are also learning about this wholesale travel company and what they offer. I’ll bet in their keyword research they saw people searching for passport and visa requirements and that prompted them to create this database on their website.

2.  Starting A Blog

Yes, no brainer, but it needs to be mentioned. Blog articles can add content to your website that can help increase organic visibility. In most cases, we recommend deploying a blog so that is a part of your website for this and a number of reasons.

See Where to put your blog for best search engine results for more about where to host a blog.

3.  Answer Questions With Articles

You can answer some of the questions you see being asked in your keyword research with relevant articles.

If you sell luggage, for example, and see people are asking various questions about airline luggage size limits, you might write an article that answers the questions. You can link to the article from appropriate product category pages and announce it via your social venues.

Article marketing can be a keystone to a content strategy for many markets. You can host some of your articles on your website while marketing some articles to other web venues. See A Step By Step Guide To Effective Online Article Marketing and  A Step By Step Guide To Effective Online Article Marketing – Part 11).

I’ll point out some other specific types of articles to get you thinking as we go along.

4.  Content About Markets / Industries Served

Many of our new clients who provide services have websites that provide only general information about the services they offer. As we perform keyword research, we look to see if people in the industries and markets our clients’ serve are searching on phrases related to their specific markets.

For example, a new client we’re working with provides services for facilities management. We found there are many searches being performed for their service within the industries they serve. However, nowhere on their site did they talk about any of these industries.

So we’re rolling out pages of content focused on each of the industries they serve. First, we test hundreds or thousands of keywords in a PPC campaign to learn which keywords to focus on. Then we create a new webpage to focus on that industry.

We plan to continually build these industry pages into sections with more content including useful articles for the industry, maybe helpful guides and resources, case studies, testimonials, videos etc. This content should not only help their organic visibility, but should help increase conversions to leads at the same time.

In addition, much of this content can be used or promoted on other web venues such as the social sites with which they participate.

5.  Case Studies

Case studies that show how a client is using and benefitting from your product or service not only may get found in searches, but you can add summaries about case studies on important product or service pages with links to the full article. This may also help improve conversions.

6.  Glossary/Dictionary

Glossaries on your website that define your industry terminology may be found in search results. One client’s competitor has done a great job with this. Their glossary (they call it an Industry Dictionary) is deployed across multiple pages focusing on just a few terms on each page.

This gives each page a better chance of being returned in search results. And it’s working well for them; pages from the dictionary are reaching high rankings for some important keyword phrases. They surround the dictionary content within their well designed webpage template that does a great job of highlighting what they offer along with subtle sales messages and links in the right column.

7.  White Papers

Useful white papers can increase organic search visibility and improve conversions at the same time. As with useful articles and case studies they can help convey your expertise, help potential customers make decisions etc. Most white papers can also be promoted effectively through your various social venues.

You might try including only a summary and bullets of what’s in some of your most useful white papers (which should get indexed and may be returned in search results) and test collecting contact info from those who download it. This can be very effective when promoting white papers via your social venues and possibly search advertising.

8.  Product Manuals, Instructions, etc.

We helped one client design an office products ecommerce site. Our keyword research showed many people searching for manuals and instructions for some of the office products they sold. So we suggested they look into providing a database of manuals with download links on their product pages.

We also suggested creating more and more of their own instruction sheets and/or videos such as “How to install an xxx into an xxx” (You’ll need to look into the copyrights of hosting manuals for products manufactured by others. If it’s not allowed, you might provide summaries of the manuals with links to download them from elsewhere).

For that same customer, we saw many people searching for Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) for some product categories. So we suggested building a database of these with links to related MSD sheets on specific product pages.

9.  Learning Centers, How To Articles, Videos, etc

If in your keyword research you see people searching for help when making buying decisions such as “best camcorder for…” then consider creating helpful articles and/or videos.

These might be found in search results, you can use them on your website to help your site visitors make decisions, and you can announce them in the social media venues you use.

Crutchfield, the electronics reseller, has done a great job of this with their Learning Center which includes both articles and videos. They put “teaser” summaries with links on appropriate product and category pages such as this video on How to Choose a Camcorder.

Notice that in addition to the text overview of the video, they have a search engine friendly tab with the transcript for the video, both of which should help with search results.

10.  Top 10 Lists

People like lists! Top 5. Top 10. Whatever. When it makes sense, publish a list (Such as 10 Content Ideas To Improve Organic Visibility).

I’m a bicyclist. The other night I was browsing a travel “magazine” on Flipboard and saw a beautiful scene with this headline “VBT’s Top Ten Vistas”.

I know who VBT is, they run bike trips all over the world (I’ve been on a couple). So I clicked through. I’ve been planning my next adventure trip and I’ve added VBT’s Ireland Trip which includes the Cliffs or Moher and their trip to Argentina to see the mountains of Patagonia, both of which I learned about while reading the Top Ten Vistas article.

Why do we like lists? See 127 Reasons Why We’re Fascinated By Lists on TheAwl and 10 Reasons Why We Love Making Lists on NPR.

To begin with, you should have three lists of keyword-types (I call them seeds):

Elements to include in keyword research

1. Seeds most important to your clients (note that these may include jargon and industry-specific terms that need further research)
2. Seeds that accurately describe the business (these would be your own layman’s terms for what this client does)
3. Seeds that are not relevant or core to your client’s business

I like to refer to these as seeds because they are a seed of an idea that could grow into giant “trees” of information and possibilities.

There’s no need at this point to distinguish between “deck” and “decking” for example, and this is a mistake SEOs often make; trying to narrow the field too much too early.

Let’s dive into each of these a little more deeply using an example of a client I did work for: Artisan Construction Services.

Note that all of these lists have far more than 2-3 keywords on them, but for purposes of example, I’ve simplified them. This client is a local (to Raleigh, NC) remodeling company that specializes in building decks and screened porches and remodeling kitchens and bathrooms. (Those are my own words for List Two).

The owner of the company, when asked to describe the product in his own words, said:

“We provide decking, siding and window replacement, and interior remodeling.”

Seeds most important to the client (based on the above description and the keywords he mentioned) are decking, siding, windows and interior remodeling. This would be List One above.

Seeds that aren’t relevant (List Three above) are things the client prefers not to do or sub-contracts out, such as roofing (says he can never do it as cheaply as professional roofers), plumbing (he hates it) and highly specialized design work like tile inlays. He’s also not a licensed electrician. So these are keyword seeds to avoid.

Example of Keyword Seed Lists

List One

List One is based on jargon, and requires further research. The first thing I do with keywords like this is to look at competitors’ websites. I’ve gotten a list of competitors from the client that I’ll research, and I’ll also put these terms into Google or Bing and look at the sites that come up in the results (I’ll localize to Raleigh, NC so that I’m getting the most accurate set of competitors).

Reviewing these sites will give me more seeds to research based on that jargon. In this case, I found specific types of decking, such as composite and pressure-treated, and I found that many competitors also refer to screened porches as sunrooms or patios (which are slightly different, but may cover more potential customers).

One additional thing the client told me is that customers often aren’t sure of what they want until they call him in for an estimate, so I’m keeping this in mind. Also during my research, I found another competitor in search that wasn’t mentioned as a major competitor. I’ll put this on a list of things to ask the client about in our next meeting.

Example of List One Expansion based on Competitors research

Next, I’ll look at how customers are actually referring to the different products and services.

I’ll use the “related searches” area at the bottom of Google’s SERPs, Google Insights to look at trends, and the “Discussions” search option (click “More” under “Search” on the left side of a Google SERP page).

Based on what I found here, I’ve learned that many people are asking what the differences are between screened porches and sunrooms, as well as that they’re sometimes referred to as lanais or three-season porches. I’ll add these seeds to my research.

I also learned that many people are interested in enclosing an existing deck into a screened porch, or “winterizing” a screened porch. More seeds for my research.

To review, I’ve taken the keyword seeds [screened porch], [patio], and [sunroom] and added:

• enclosing deck
• winterizing porch
• lanai
• three-season porch

These are all things that my client’s customers are looking for that his competitors aren’t servicing. They should be easy wins.

Example of List Two expansion based on Google "Discussions"

List Two

I can research List Two in much the same way I did List One. I’ll add these seeds to the research as well.

List Three

List Three is a little different from the others. I won’t add these as seeds to my research, but I will save them for the elimination and refinement process later.

This is where instinct and experience becomes particularly useful, as it’s likely that I can take any list of keywords to avoid and expand it on instinct.

For example, based on what I know of this client, he already wants to avoid roofing, plumbing, tile, and electrical. But here are a few more statements I jotted down at our meeting that give me more clues:

• “I’m not the best priced contractor out there, because I don’t hire any undocumented workers and I pay my taxes. But I am very experienced and my clients are always happy with my work.”

Now I know I need to avoid [cheap], [free], [low-cost], [best priced], and other keywords like that. [Quality], [experience] and [ethical] are possible modifiers that are allowed.

• “I prefer to work with composite materials rather than pressure-treated lumber for decks. It’s much higher quality and creates a nicer finished product.”

So it’s a good idea to focus on any searches asking for the differences between those materials. Also I’ll probably weight the research more heavily to different types and brands of composite materials.

Another note I’m jotting down from this statement is to suggest the client create a page that discusses the pros and cons of composite vs. pressure-treated materials.

• “A lot of customers get a quote from a company like SEARS home improvement when they’re thinking about doing a remodeling project. This makes it tough for me because the materials that SEARS uses are limited to less-expensive ones. It helps me a lot if I can get a sense of a client’s budget beforehand; a single project can vary by thousands of dollars depending on the materials used. But of course, nicer materials create a nicer finished project.”

I’m not exactly sure what I could take from this, but there are likely to be a lot of keywords related to home improvement and/or SEARS.

I’ll be careful of those keywords and use something like Google Insights to determine if those trend higher at a certain time of year. I might even put them into a tool like ComScore to see if I can determine if people who search for [home improvement] related terms are in a lower income bracket. Of course, I also know I’ll have to avoid any keywords having to do with the television program of the same name.

Example of expansion of List Three based on notes from the client meeting

This is just the tip of the iceberg for keyword research. The proverbial “rabbit hole” can get very deep sometimes, so it’s important to make good decisions about which keywords to expand and which to keep at surface level.

I’m sure at this point, you’re wondering why I haven’t mentioned Google’s Keyword Frequency Tool. Researching search frequency can be very useful, especially in determining how far to expand a certain keyword seed. For example, I found almost immediately that [lanai] has very low search frequency. So I didn’t spend a lot of time on it.

Conversely, I found that [enclosing deck] is actually quite large, especially when viewed through Google Insights in the spring and summer months, localized to North Carolina.

Ultimately, I’ll put all of these keyword seeds into the Google Keyword Tool to find the most highly searched combinations of keywords and an overall estimate of the search frequency of one service (decks) over another (window replacement). This will help me guide the client on what content should be created for the website.

I prefer to do most of the research in the manner discussed above, and then use search frequency to refine, categorize and prioritize it. I have certain tools and formulas that I use to do that. Next time, I’ll give you these tools and explain how to refine what you’ve found and present it to your client.

Thanks to Artisan Construction for allowing me to use them as an example.

If you’ve been following along in this series, we covered the first steps in the previous two articles.

1. Choose The Keywords To Focus On

In Organic Keywords: The First Step In Search Engine Optimization, I covered how to use Google analytics to choose the organic keyword phrases to focus on first in your optimization efforts; those keywords already contributing to the business goals. We then looked at how to use Google analytics to help “map” those keywords to existing pages on the site.

Below is a copy of the prioritized keyword mapping we developed for a client in one of the previous steps. I’ll refer to this later.

Prioritized keyword mapping

2. Prioritize Your Keywords

In How To Prioritize Keywords For Optimization Based On Organic Competition,I covered how we prioritize the keywords by evaluating the difficulty of reaching top organic results.

3. Check That Important Content On The Page Is Getting Indexed

As I start optimizing a page, I check to make sure all the important content on the page is getting indexed by checking Google’s “text-only” version of the page’s cache, Bing’s cache, and/or using one or more page analyzers or crawlers.

Find the page in Google or Bing’s index with a “Site:domain.com keyword phrase” search. In Google, hover over the search listing then hover over the arrows that appear at the end of the listing to see the page snapshot. Then click on the “cached” link above the page snapshot.

View Google Page Cache

Finally, when the Cache version of the page appears, click on the “text-only version” link.

View Google’s Text Only Version of Page Cache

In Bing, you also hover over the listing, then hover of the arrow that appears. A window with info about the page will appear. Click on the “cached page” link.

By doing a “Site:domain.com keyword phrase” search, the keyword phrase will be highlighted if Bing can read it. You can also select sections of text on the page to see if the text is editable text that can be read by search engines or whether the text actually part of an image.

View Bing Page Cache

I put the cache version of the page side by side with the actual page and compare the two. I’m looking to make sure that all important content on the page is getting indexed.

I make note of any issues that we need to discuss with the web developers such as the use of techniques that are not indexed easily by search engines (Flash, content included by JavaScript calls etc). I also make note of text in images that we’d ideally like change to indexable text.

If employing more search engine friendly methods isn’t currently an option, I’ll make a note not to optimize that content since it isn’t being indexed anyway.

4. Ensure The Indexed Text Is Unique

Next, I make sure the content on the page I’m going to optimize is unique.

Copy a snippet of what appears to be unique text from the page that you are going to optimize. Then search for it in Google with parenthesizes around the text.

If you get multiple results for a search on unique text, examine the files to see if a large portion of the content is indeed duplicate or very similar.

If the pages are duplicates or very similar content located on multiple websites, this may be a case of multiple web sites using similar content (very common with affiliate or ecommerce sites that use content provided by manufacturers etc).

If you find this to be the case for a significant amount of the content on a page you are going to optimize you’ll need to decide whether to rewrite the content or attempt to include “enough” unique content on the page otherwise you’ll be competing with all those other sites for listings.

However, before you start making significant changes like this to a page see the note below About Potential Effects on the Conversion Rate.

There are other reasons you may find duplicate content on other websites such as the content having being scraped and used elsewhere which you’ll want to deal with (that could mean getting a lawyer involved).

You might also find duplicate paths (URL’s) to the same pages or other pages on the site with very similar content which is another issue that can affect rankings. See How To Improve Organic Search Results With A Simple Site Audit for more about duplicate paths.

A Note About Potential Effects on the Conversion Rate

Before we get started actually optimizing, I do want to point out that I’m very careful not to make extensive changes to content on a page that is already converting well.

If you’ve been following the steps outlined in this series of articles, then you are likely optimizing pages that have been generating business. Just about any change you make on a page can affect the user experience and have an effect, either positive or negative, on the conversion rate.

Many of the changes we make are fairly subtle changes to existing text and images that shouldn’t have a dramatic effect on the conversion rate.

However, if you are going to make fairly extensive changes such as adding new content, completely rewriting content etc then consider testing those changes first using either an a/b test within a PPC campaign or a multivariate testing system such as Google’s Website Optimizer to make sure you don’t significantly decrease the conversion rate.

5. Try To Improve The Search Listings For The Keywords

Search for each keyword phrase you are going to focus on and determine how the search engine is generating the search listing so that you can attempt to improve it if needed.

In this case, you’ll want to search for the phrase the same way most people search, that is without putting quotes around the phrase. So for one of the phrases in the keyword mapping example above, I’ll search for [chrome frame sliders] without putting quotes around the phrase.

In North America, you should check the listings for at least Google and Bing (The Yahoo listing will be very similar to the Bing listing).

Tip: Rather than searching through pages of listings to find a search result you can append the keyword phrase to a Site:DomainName search. It’s the same listing. I’ve checked this many times. A Google search for “site:domainname.com chrome frame sliders” for example returns the same listing as does a search for [chrome frame sliders].

Determine How The Search Engine Generated The Listing

 Next determine how the search engine generated the listing; by extracting text on the page, from the Meta Description Tag, some combination, etc.

Google may still display the listing from the Open Directory Project, but typically only for the home page. I believe Bing/Yahoo may still display the listing from the Yahoo Directory, although I haven’t seen this in some time. I also see Bing displaying listings from the Open Directory Project.

If the results being displayed from a directory are not ideal, you can try to update the directory listing (which can take quite a while with the Open Directory Project) or see this Google article for information about how to use a noodp Meta tag to tell search engines not to display the description from the Open Directory Project. See this article for info on how to use a noydir meta tag to stop Bing/Yahoo from displaying the listing from the Yahoo Directory.

Try to Influence the Search Listing

I list all the current search listings for the phrases I’ll be focusing on as well, as well as average rankings, CTR etc., as I optimize a page and try to improve the listing by modifying the text the search engine is pulling from on the page whether it’s text on the page or from the Meta Description Tag or some combination.

For example, a typical Google search listing for an important keyword phrase was being extracted from the main paragraph of text on a client’s home page.

The listing was not horrible (many are) but the CTR for this listing was low. I reworked the message on the home page to make it more client focused which lead to a much more enticing search listing.

6. Update Or Add A Headline

Page headlines are usually read by your human visitors so I try to make sure most pages I work on have one. If I can include one or two important keywords in it all the better. This not only should help rankings but also help assure site visitors who just searched on the keyword that they came to the right place.

7. Optimize Existing Text

Next I make suggestions to optimize the rest of the visible text on the page. These are usually very subtle changes as I try not to negatively impact the conversion rate. I look for ways to include variations of the  important keywords without forcing them into the text and making the messages awkward (Remember your human visitors come first).

Here’s an example of some existing test from the motorcycle frame sliders page:

“These were produced by Diamond Powersports and are made of high quality Delrin or Chromed Billet Aluminum and are designed to protect the motorcycle’s fairings and frame in the event of a fall over or other accident. The materials used maintain the color even if scratched or chipped. The color is solid throughout the part and is not a surface coating. These sliders come complete with superior grade metric bolts and high quality machined mounting brackets if needed for the make and model of your machine.”

And here’s how I’ll suggest they modify this text.

“These frame sliders were produced by Diamond Powersports and are made of high quality Delrin or Chromed Billet Aluminum and are designed to protect the motorcycle’s fairings and frame in the event of a fall over or other accident. The materials used maintain the color even if scratched or chipped. The color is solid throughout the part and is not a surface coating. These frame sliders come complete with superior grade metric bolts and high quality machined mounting brackets if needed for the make and model of your machine.”

I could have “forced” keyword phrases into this text even more but at the expense of readability. I then continue on and make subtle changes in the rest of the visible text on the page.

8. Look For Text In Images

There is often content on webpages that can’t be read by search engines including text within images. I’m working on a website now, for example, where the only visible text on the home page is actually within an image.

As search engines are extracting text to create search listings from the only text they can read, they are only grabbing a few news items that appear on a mouse over. This is leading to irrelevant search listings that won’t help entice people to click though to the site. Plus, we can’t optimize the text to improve rankings and listings.

So, I’ll be recommending they have a Web developer rebuild the image using text that the search engines can read. A skilled web developer should be able to rebuild most images so that text is search engine friendly using CSS, background images, etc. I’m amazed at how many clients use Web developers that have no clue how to do this. If search engine results are important to you (you’re reading SEL so I assume they are) then find an experience developer who can do this.

9. Possibly Add New Content On The Page

After editing the existing content, I may look for places to add new content on the page, especially if we need more content in order to focus on important keywords. Here are some ideas.

Left/Right Column Content

I look for places on the page to add content that can be both helpful to the user and may help improve search results and conversions.

For example, I might suggest some sales or positioning messages in the right of left columns. I’ll ask if the client has any testimonials and possibly insert snippets from one or an entire testimonial in right column, ideally on that includes one or more important keywords. If they have some useful articles they’ve written, I might suggest putting a summary in the right column that links to the full article.

Content Below The Fold

I sometimes develop a paragraph or more of text and suggest they add it below the fold. This is usually the case for the often image heavy homepages. In that homepage, I mentioned above the text contained in the image only talks about a couple of broad important keywords.

I’ll suggest they add some new text lower on the home page to talk about some important services they offer and ideally link to pages for more information about each service.

10. Develop Alt Tags for the Image Links

Alt Tags for static images (images that are not used as links) are used to provide information about what is in the image for those who mouse over the image, those with slow speed connections, those who turn off image downloading, or for the visually impaired who use page readers.

Alt Tags for images that are used as links should provide additional information about what can be expected when someone clicks on the image link.

If you can develop keyword rich Alt Tags for image links this can help improve the rankings for both the page where they are embedded in and the page they link to (see below for more on internal linking).

11. Update The HTML Page Title & Meta Description Tag

After I’ve developed all the suggestions for optimizing the content on the page, I work on the HTML Page Title and Meta Description Tag.

There are plenty of articles in Search Engine Land about crafting HTML Page Titles and Meta tags such as these:

• Writing HTML Title Tags For Humans, Google & Bing
• Google’s Tips On How To Write A Good Meta Description

I will make a few points about these tags.

Check for CMS Issues with Tag Handling

Before spending your time crafting beautiful tags check to see if there are any issues with how these tags are generated on your website. There are often limitations with CMS systems like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc.

You may need to see if there are settings or plug-ins available to improve HTML Page title and description tag handling. Sometimes, you’ll need to develop your tags within limits constrained by the web development system.

Longer, Truncated Titles

I usually make titles longer than what the major search engines display, which is currently about 65 to 70 characters. However, I make sure the first 65 to 70 characters is crafted to do the best job of enticing people to click through from search listings.

I focus on 2-3 important keywords even if they are not all contained within the first 65 to 70 characters of the page title as the search engines likely index beyond what they display.

Title and Description Should Entice Searchers to Click

Remember that the purpose of Titles and Description tags is to tell people what the web site, site section/category, or the specific page is about. So craft Title and Description tags to work together to try to attract visitors scanning search results to click to your website.

Keywords in Both Title and Content

You’ll usually want to focus on 2-3 important keywords that are included in the visible, indexable content on the page within the Title. Again, the title and description tag should relate closely to the content on the page.

Plus, it will take the combination of the keyword in the page title and within the content on the page (along with other factors such as internal and external linking) to reach top rankings for competitive phrases.

12. Increase Internal / External Links  & Social Engagement

Internal links from within the Web and even more so external links from other sites affect rankings. So I look for how we might increase the internal links to the page such as adding it to one or more of the navigation systems if appropriate, adding it to the HTML site map etc.

More importantly, I look for ways to add links to the page from within the main body of content on other pages, ideally those that are ranking well for other competitive phrases. This should help rankings. However, again remember that your human visitors come first: these links should be added only if they make sense for moving humans along to the page

For the Frame Sliders page, for example, the current product line is a closeout so maybe we can put text or image links on the home page and some other pages such as the following:

Frame Sliders Clearance

Up to 50% Off

I then look for ways to get social mentions and more external links pointing to this page or to pages one click away such as mentioning the topic in a press release or article with a link to an inner page, talking about the topic and pointing to a page in some social venues, etc. Frame sliders at 50% off could be mentioned in the client’s social media venues for example.

Make Sure The Recommendations Are Implemented Correctly

Finally, if you are not the person who implements the suggestions you developed make a point of checking them as soon as possible after they have been completed. Most of our suggestions are implemented either by a client’s IT department or their Web development company and it’s very rare that the suggestions are implemented correctly the first time.