Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

Stoney de Geyter, Pole Position Marketing spoke on Keyword Research and Positioning

And afterward, I was fortunate to have lunch with him and a friend (fan) from the Reno area, where they came from - into drippy Portland - which she described as “quaint and cloudy.” Yeah, hey…

Keyword selection is:

• Foundation for all online marketing efforts.
• Learn how to target your audience, define how people find you…
• It can be time-consuming and difficult, but
• If you have the wrong keywords, you can derail your marketing.

This is time-based and cumulative work - it’s important to keep the momentum building for your business.

Phase 1: As you’re coming up with keywords, brainstorm -put yourself in the mind of the searcher. Your ultimate goal - to drive targeted traffic to your site.

• Core terms - unique phrases that summarize what your site is about. i.e. if your product is a duffel bag - ‘Bag’ is too broad - consider duffle bag, sports bag, wholesale bag, etc. as potential terms.
• Start pouring through the website and look at content - what words are used to describe your service. What do your keyword descriptions/etc. say? How does your navigation work?
• Wordtracker (mentioned by several people today), Keyword Discovery, Google, Yahoo, l3xicon.com - all have tools you can use to help deliver keyword suggestions.

When you’ve come up with your most important core terms - he suggests 10 words or so… for each term, look at the following:

• Search volume
• Target audience
• Profit (spend on your higher margin product search terms), and finally,
• Consider your company’s ability to meet demand when your ads are successful…

While you’re going through this phase, don’t analyze, gather… look for search phrases that contain core terms. You’ll end up with 100’s - 1000’s of phrases. Don’t be overwhelmed with numbers.

Phase 2 - sort and select keywords - Keywords that convert with targeted traffic to your site.

• Adidas shouldn’t buy “Air Jordan” as keywords have gotta be relevant. People searching for “Air Jordan” shoes are probably not going to be tempted by an Adidas ad.
• Don’t use inappropriate words or phrases on your site like “discount” or “cheap,” if you’ve got luxury goods - and vice versa.
• Don’t choose broad phrases like “bags” or “shoes.” It’d be a waste of your time.
• Keep track of purely “informational” queries later - you might want to write a whitepaper on informational keywords in your industry and drive traffic that way.
• Make sure you are selecting keywords that are actively being searched. If you’re too specific with search phrases, there’s likely to be no volume.
• The law of large numbers lets you put in specific phrases if there’s volume.
• 2-4 word phrase range is best.

Organizing keywords - get every viable keyword optimized. Both short (general keywords) and long tail (specific phrases). This provides framework for for your long-term search efforts.

Then identify pages on your site, each page should have a specific focus on specific keywords. Create pages if you don’t have content around keywords you’re going to address.
Group keywords by qualifiers - qualifiers can be words like ‘quality,’ ‘durable,’ ‘memorable,’ - but keywords must work together, you shouldn’t match ‘elegant’ with ‘cheap.’ ‘Antique ‘and ‘vintage’ go together. Let there be a natural fit and flow to the content.

Never force natural language. Don’t rush, take your time to select and build the proper foundation.

Emarketingperformance has PDF of good information on keyword research.