Using Keywords For Better Organic Searches
We're using Google's free keyword tool to find the right keywords to use for our 'dogs' project. Before we even register a website, we need to find out what are the most optimal keywords. While I am gearing this information to help you get better rankings for your keywords with organic searches, this will also put you miles ahead, if you are using PPC - Pay Per Click.
FYI - 'Organic searches', are when a person types in a word or phrase in the search engine and sites that are relevant to that term show up without having to pay to advertise.
Drilling Down
The term 'dogs', produced over 30 million searches. That is a very competitive keyword. So, if you are planning to build a site about dogs, it will be a long time, if ever, that you will show up on the first few pages of organic searches. The term is just too large and it really doesn't offer us any specific information about a person's intent for what they really are searching for. And you would be wasting your money by using PPC on the word dogs, to get people to your site to buy anything.
After all, people own specific breeds of dogs, and so they would want the information or products they are seeking, tailored to that particular interest. So what we will be looking for are called 'long tailed keywords'.
What are Your Interests?
What is my site about? Your best bet would be to focus on a breed of dogs you know something about, and have had personal experience about. If not, then really do your homework, because people who have dogs can be very passionate and knowledgeable about their animal. So you won't get people coming back to your site if you don't have good information and advice. One other note, on average it takes around six or more visits to your site before a person may feel comfortable enough to purchase anything. Of course this same stat doesn't always apply to a site that has successfully branded itself and obviously has been around for years.
German Shepherd
I know something about German Shepherds, so using our keywords information, let's drill down and see what we may be able to use to our advantage.
The term 'German Shepherd', shows over 1.5 million recent searches. Much better that 30 million, but still a crowded marketplace. And here's an important tip. Our keyword tool shows us how many people are searching for the term, but now take that term, 'German Shepherd' and put it directly into Google's search engine. There are over 5.9 million pages about 'German Shepherd', already indexed in the search engine. That is way too many, already established pages, for us to come up in organic searches. Now if you put a parenthesis around "German Shepherd", Google calls that an exact match, let's see how many pages show up for our exact match. I get 5.3 million pages. We're still a bit in over our heads.
If you add an 's' and search for German Shepherds', you are looking at over 7.3 million already indexed pages.
Drilling Down Further
Using my Firefox browser, I have opened several tabs, and so I can easily go back and forth from Google's keyword tool and the looking at the results in the search engines.
Our original keyword list returned several searches relating to German Shepherd. So now let's start a new search using the term 'German Shepherd'. Here is where you can start getting very specific long tailed keywords.
I see 'German Shepherd Information", has around 3,000 searches a month. Let's see how many pages are indexed; over 6 million, put our phrase in parenthesis; just over 7,000 pages. Now we are getting somewhere. But with 6 million pages indexed, let's just make a note of that phrase and keep searching.
I see 'German Shepherd dog names', this keyword has under a million indexed pages and only 15 thousand when using our exact search. So this is another keyword to take note of. What we are doing here is that until we settle on our main keyword is finding additional keywords to use when naming and building our site.
Hopefully you should have the basic idea by now. Keyword research takes time. You may take hours and hours doing this so be sure to take notes, so you won't have to go back and rediscover your finds.
Ideally, you should find long tailed keywords with a decent amount of searches and less than 100,000 pages indexed, even less if possible. The idea is to build up your site from there, gradually adding more keywords and related content.
Then you take that keyword and do a name search for your website, to see what is available. For organic searches especially, it is important that you have your keyword in your domain name, and the shorter the better.
In 'Using Keywords', part 4, I will show you even more information that Google offers, which will enable you to drill down and be even more specific as to what people are searching for.
Be Fearless
Billy Ojai
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