How to succeed with keywords
It’s vital to use search keywords in the right way to drive an audience to your site.
Search keywords have an iffy history. In the early days of the internet, it was common for websites to stuff dozens of halfrelevant terms into their metadata – the idea being to trick search engines into directing visitors to your site, almost regardless of what they were searching for.
Search engines are now smarter than that – you can’t persuade Google that your site is the web’s foremost reseller of secondhand computers simply by repeating the words a hundred times on every page.
But keywords are still hugely important. Using relevant terms in appropriate places on your website helps visitors – and search engines – quickly find what they’re looking for. And when you’re buying online ads, choosing the right keywords ensures that your adverts will appear beside relevant searches.
In this article we’ll explore the best ways to select and deploy keywords – and how to track what they’re doing for you. The goal is to help visitors to find your site “organically” (that is, by entering their own search terms), and also to maximise the number of customers acquired through paid-for ads.
Finding the best keyword
Imagine you’re launching a new bed and breakfast business. You’ve hired a contractor to put together a website, but you don’t have a budget for making lots of changes later on once it goes live – so you need to make sure it’s working hard from day one. The question is: which keywords do you want to repeat throughout the site? Are you going to write “bed and breakfast”, “bnb” or “b&b”?
You might instinctively go for the first option. It’s the “correct” term, and it’s clear and simple. But look at the graph opposite, which tracks how many people have been searching for these three different terms. Over the past year, more UK-based Google users have been searching for “b&b” than for “bed and breakfast”. And despite the rise of Airbnb, “bnb” on its own fares even worse.
The message is clear. Since Brits are searching for “b&b”, that’s the phrase you should consistently use in your copy, as well as in the alt tags of images and at least one crosshead on each page. It’s also the best single term to target when buying contextsensitive ads.
Clearly this information about search volumes is hugely valuable –
“Using relevant terms in appropriate places on your website helps visitors – and search engines – quickly find what they’re looking for”
and believe it or not, it’s completely free to access at Google Trends ( trends.google.com). It can be a real eye-opener to compare multiple terms and see which is more popular: as another example, if you’re selling used cars, Trends would suggest that you favour “VW” over “Volkswagen”, since the German auto maker’s initials have outperformed its full name over the past year. Indeed, in some weeks there have been five times as many people searching for “VW” as “Volkswagen”.
The same principle applies regardless of what line of business you’re in. If you’re renting out mobile homes, for example, “camper” beats both “campervan” and “camper van”. Whereas, if you’re selling knitting patterns, “jumper” beats “sweater” – and hardly anyone ever asks Google for a “pullover”.
Think like a customer
Google Trends is a very powerful tool, but it’s not the be-all and end-all of online marketing. Even if you litter your website with references to “b&b” or “VW”, that won’t make it rise to the
top of the search results because everyone else is using the same terms, and you’re competing with some huge businesses.
For instance, when we search for “campervan”, the first hits we get are Gumtree and eBay, with the main Volkswagen site following close behind. For a keyword such as this, your small business is likely to be buried many pages back.
So how do you get an edge? The answer is to think less like a business and more like a customer. Don’t try to attract everyone in the world who’s looking for a bed and breakfast – focus on making yourself visible to the people who need to find you. If you’re running a van hire business in North Wales, for instance, make sure your site refers to “campervan hire in Snowdonia”, “renting a campervan in Wales” and “campervan holidays in Llandudno”. That will help bring you to the attention of the people who are actually likely to become customers.
These multi-word phrases are key to search engine optimisation (SEO). Although there may not be many people searching for a given set of terms, consultancy Moz calculates that 70% of overall search engine activity is of this type ( pcpro.
link/287seo). Practitioners refer to this as the “long tail” of search traffic.
So it’s clear what you need to do: anticipate the specific searches that your customers will be making, and include them word-for-word on your site. Don’t worry about missing out on volume – the visitors you do attract will be more valuable. As Moz explains, “long tail keywords often convert better, because they catch people later in the buying/ conversion cycle. A person searching for ‘shoes’ is probably browsing, and not ready to buy. On the other hand, someone searching for ‘best price on Air Jordan size 12’ practically has their wallet out.”
Long tail advertising
The long tail isn’t just about the keywords you embed in your site – it can make your advertising much more effective, and even save you money. If you were to invest £20 a day advertising to UK-based web users searching for the word “campervan”, Google estimates that you would get around 13,000 impressions and 71 clicks (see adwords. google.com for more statistics of this type).
That might not sound like a bad return, but these clicks are likely to include people looking to buy a camper van, people looking for spares, or those seeking garages, insurance deals or any number of other related services. It’s likely that not a single one of those 71 visitors will be looking to hire a van in Wales.
If you refine your keywords, you can do much better. At first, the figures may not look very encouraging: “campervan hire wales” and “motorhome hire wales” combined will only attract an estimated 562 impressions, and just 30 clickthroughs. However, that’s still a big increase in engagement – up from 0.5% of the audience to 5.3%. And since the search term was much more relevant to our specific business, it’s likely that those 30 people will include some bona fide customers.
We can do better still by targeting some additional terms. Adding “camper van hire wales”, “campervan rental wales” and “motorhome rental wales” brings an extra ten visitors a day to our site – without increasing the advertising budget.
Of course, we still won’t get as many visitors as we would from targeting the general term. In fact, we can expect to see only just over half as many. But those visitors are vastly more likely to become customers – which means a much better return on your advertising budget.
What are people searching for?
Knowing that the long tail delivers a relevant and engaged audience is all
very well, but how do you work out the best long tail phrases to target? Again, the answer is to think like a customer. Google uses what it knows about page structure and popular searches to guess which pages will best match a user’s search terms. You can explore this by searching for your own business and seeing what suggestions pop up as you type, as well as which pages come up when you hit return. (Ideally, you should do this in a web browser you don’t normally use, so that your results aren’t diluted by your own search history and preferences.)
In our example case, searching for “campervan hire in wales” gives us results that include geographic variations, and a variety of closely related phrases. Predictably, these include “VW” and “UK”; one you might not have anticipated is “wedding”, but knowing it’s there tells you that it’s worth working into your site. Other terms include “affordable”, “budget”, “luxury” and “weekend”, which you can target depending on the market you’re going for.
These suggestions are largely the result of latent semantic indexing (or “LSI” for short), which is the process by which search engines link keywords together based on past searches, and on the information they find alongside search terms on the pages they index. To save you having to try out hundreds of similar searches, tools such as LSI Graph ( lsigraph.com) can interrogate Google on your behalf and pull out an extensive list of combinations. Typing in “b&b wales” gave us a lot of great ideas, like “by the sea”, “seaside”, “best places to stay in wales”, “farmhouse b&b north wales” and so on. All of this can inform new content or tweaks to what already exists on our site.
Finding the keyword sweet spot
If there’s a problem with all this analysis, it’s that it can leave you wanting to target dozens of keywords, and diluting the overall effectiveness of your site. What you need is a keyword analysis tool that can help you zero in on the most effective combination of terms.
One such utility, Keyword Tool Dominator ( keywordtooldominator.
com), spins out any search term you enter for the “.com” or “.co.uk” versions of Google. It ranks each result from most to least popular, meaning that, if there are several options that suit your content, it’s easy to see which is more likely to deliver the results you need.
Another option is Moz’s Keyword Explorer tool ( moz.com/explorer), which takes a slightly different approach to deliver a lot of information about your chosen keywords and phrases. Rather than ranking keywords, it gives you a difficulty score, indicating how tough you’d find it to win a page-one position in search results when competing against every other site on the web targeting the same
keywords. For “b&b”, for example, it gives us a difficulty score of 44/100, with an organic clickthrough rate of around 64% – that’s not bad, but it could be a lot better.
These numeric metrics make it very easy to compare the expected performance of different terms. If we try out a few variations on our keywords, it’s clear which search term is easiest to rank for.
Since “b&b north wales” also has the highest organic clickthrough rate, it’s a no-brainer. Even if we were based in Llandudno, we’d be wise to emphasise the region as well as the specific town in our marketing.
Life after Google
In this article we’ve focused almost exclusively on Google, and it’s pretty obvious why. According to analytics firm Statcounter, Google represents around 90% of the search market – and 93% on mobile devices. Secondplace Bing has a tiny 3.24% of the market, then Yahoo on 2.08%.
Even if things change in the future, the principles we’ve discussed above aren’t engine-specific. Any improvements you make with Google in mind should help across the board.
On that note, though, it’s important to remember that nothing on the web lasts forever. Once you’ve got your keywords in place, monitor their performance and, ideally, repeat the tests we’ve discussed every few months and check that you’re still targeting the best keywords. New competitors may enter the market, visitors’ tastes can change, and search engines periodically tweak their algorithms, so something that works today may be less successful in six or 12 months’ time.