4 Keyword Research Rules – Transcript

Following is the transcript of the Four Golden Rules video.

The first rule of course is relevance. If your keywords are not relevant, there’s simply no way the rest of this is going to work. You can optimize for keywords, you can do everything right and drive traffic to your site, you can rank in the first page of Google but if your keywords aren’t relevant for what you’re bringing traffic for, it’s not going to convert, they’re not going to buy what you’re offering, they’re not going to click on you’re links, it’s not going to work, they’re just going to hit the back button in a short amount of time. If you’re driving traffic to your site and your Google Analytics shows that the people aren’t staying on your site more than 10 or 15 seconds, 30 seconds even, that’s not long enough.

You know something’s wrong. So if they’re coming to your site via keywords from Google and Yahoo and Bing and they’re not staying on your site even though they found your site with those keywords, then those keywords aren’t relevant. As long as your content is decent, you have a decent site. That has to be a given, you have to have a decent site, decent content anyway. If you do have a good site and you’re bringing traffic in via certain keywords and visitors are not staying on your site, that’s a sure indicator that those keywords are not relevant. So you absolutely must know your target market and know what they’re searching for and so when they perform those searches and find your site, they’ll be glad they found it. That’s what relevancy is all about. So the first rule is being relevant; having those keywords that are most relevant to connect you to your target audience.

And you just have to know your target audience, it’s you’re area. You know if your into surfing for example, I don’t know much about surfing, I don’t know anything about surfing so I’m not going to really be able to brainstorm with you on some of those base keywords. But you know some of those base areas about surfing that surfers would be searching for. If you know that, that’s your area, well then that’s going to be up to you and that’s part of the skill involved in this. Keyword research is not just paint by numbers; it’s not just fill in the blanks. A lot of it is skill and that’s one of the skills you have to incorporate right off and that’s finding those relevant areas for those keywords and then we let the keyword tools – or however you do your research – fill in the gaps there but you have to come up with those base areas of keywords.

And by the way if you go to my website weberinternetmarketing.com, you can see four very good videos on these subjects. I have a link up at the top of the page there for the Four Golden Rules of Keyword Research. Again that’s weberinternetmarketing.com. Go there and watch those videos, you’ll be miles ahead of your competition.

Number Two – Traffic. You have to pick keywords that produce traffic. You can rank on the first page of Google. I get this all the time, somebody says, “Hey I rank on the first page”, I said, “Great, what do you rank for, what do I search for to find you?” They tell me some obscure phrase or keyword that I know nobody is going to be searching for. And you know any web page can rank on the first page for something. Every page does. Take any one of your pages and find some phrase in there, some long tail phrase and do a search for it and you’ll find that page there on the first page of Google.

Ranking on the first pages of Google doesn’t make any difference unless it ranks for a term that people are actually searching for so you have to make sure of that. You either trust a good key word tool like Market Samurai and those are really good videos, I really suggest you go and watch those on my website there, watch those keyword research videos or do a ad words test campaign and figure out what keywords are actually getting impressions; that’s a 100% positive indicator of which keywords people are actually typing in is doing a test campaign and watching those impressions.

Put those key words in quotes and then you’ll know exactly which keywords they’re typing in exactly. But you have to determine that. You’ve go to know that you’re optimizing for keywords that people will actually search for and that sounds really simple and logical but a lot of people do not do that, they just come up with these keywords out of their head somewhere. They think, “That’s a pretty good one,” and they do it and come to find out nobody’s searching for it so they went to all that trouble; they’ve optimized their page, they’ve written all that content, published it on the web and nobody’s going to search for that page. Happens all the time so you must know that.

Next is competition. Now, competition kind of goes hand in hand with traffic. The more competition there is for a key- word probably the more traffic there is and the less the competition there is for it, probably the less traffic there is available that key- word. You’re goal as a search engine optimizer is to find the sweet stop, you don’t want to pick key- words that are really easy to rank for because they probably don’t have a lot of competition and therefore they probably don’t have a lot of traffic potential.

And on the flip side, you don’t want to pick key- words that get a ton of traffic because probably those key- words have a lot of competition and your chances, the ease of which you can rank for those key-words with a ton of traffic, are not good. Your chances are not good there so you need to find the sweet spot somewhere in the middle and again this is part of the skill involved in SEO, finding that sweet spot you can actually rank well for but also get some okay traffic.

That’s the sweet spot and that’s up to you to find that. That’s up to you to decipher the key word tool information, decipher your ad words test campaign information, and decipher the relevance of those key -words. That’s all up to you and that’s part of the skill and you probably won’t get all this right the first time. Don’t except to get this 100% right the first time out because you’re probably not going to, it takes practice. So start with a little niche and practice, work on these four golden rules of keyword research.

Next is how commercial the key words are. And the best way for me to give you an explanation of what I mean here is to use some real life examples of one of my own websites. I have a website about dog arthritis. Now, I optimized for a lot of key words on that site. Some are very commercial and some are not. Commercial simply means if you use that keyword to bring traffic in, will that traffic result in people buying something or clicking on affiliate links or Ad Sense ads, will people take action when they get there.

Are they ready to probably buy this or are they really close. That’s an indicator that the key word is very commercial. If they come to your site just looking for information and they’re not really in the mood or programmed to buy something at that time, then the keyword’s not very commercial. Now for our dog arthritis site, when I optimize for a brand name, an actual product that has a brand name and people search for that brand name, people searching for that brand of product, either want to buy it, they want to find some place cheaper to buy it, they’re ready to buy it, or they have heard about it and they probably will buy it with a little bit more information and if I can convince them it’s a really good product they’ll probably buy it.

So the brand name of that product is very commercial because people searching for it already know about it, they’re already in the mood for buying it. They probably will buy it so it’s very, very commercial. On the other hand, if they search for something like symptoms of dog arthritis, well there’ll be 4 or 5 pages they see on that search results page and they’re just in the browsing mode probably. The majority are just browsing.

They’re just looking around. They’re trying to figure out if their dog does have arthritis. They’re not ready to buy something right now probably. So that means that that key word term is a lot less commercial than the trade name, it’s a lot less commercial because those people are looking mainly for information at that time. That’s not to say they might not later be a customer; if you collect their lead and you can keep promoting to them and talking to them, they might become a customer down the road but right at that given moment, that key-word is not as commercial as a trade name, they’re looking for information more than likely.

So they’re going to read your site if you’ve got good information and the longer you keep them on your site, they might click an ad sense ad or an affiliate ad but it’s not as commercial so you need to look at your own area and figure out for your own keywords, you know you probably have a big set of key word possibilities, if you’ve done your key-word research you might have 10 or 20 key-words and how commercial those key words are is one of the things that you will need to look at in order to future out the hand full of key-words you really want to focus on. Each site has that hand full of key words and all four of these golden rules fit that small handful of keywords.

You might have a long list of 50 keywords, I often have more, and I’m looking right now at a list of keywords that is 3 pages long, printed out. There are probably 200 keywords here for this one site and there are 5 or 6 on here that I know are the ones that I really focus on. I do really a good job with SEO on these pages and I hit those hard. I write numerous pages on those key words, different versions of those key words, twist them around a little bit, hit them at a different angle, write the content with a little bit different angle on the keywords, and write 3 or 4 pages on each one of those keywords and those are the ones I really hit on. But then when I’m done with it, I’ll come back and take the rest of my list, the list that may not fit, the rest of the key words may not fit all four of these things really well.

For example some of these keywords may only get 20 or 30 searches a month, well that’s okay even though that’s not very many. It may take me 15 minutes to write a quick page because it’s content I know really well and I’ll have it up there and so every month I’ll have a really good chance of presenting that page to 30 or some people a month and if it’s optimized well and shows up high, then I have a good chance of converting maybe 1 sale a month from that search term.

Or even a couple of sales a year would make that 15 minutes one time worth it, you have to look at it like that. Anyway, that’s the four golden rules of key word research and again if you go to my website, you can watch some really good videos up at the top of the page. Up at the top of each page I have that link to the four golden rules of website research so check it out and let me know if you have any question. Thanks.