Pick Effective Search Engine Keywords With a "Google Feedback Loop"

The importance of focus

One of the hardest aspects of search engine optimization  --- particularly for a newer site --- is the task of deciding which keywords to optimize the site for.  This is a critically important task, because being found toward the top of search engine results for words related to your company's products and services will mean more traffic to your website, more phone calls and more sales.

One of the most important rules for trying to pick the right keywords is to keep the focus as narrow as possible.  There are several good reasons for this. 

The first and most discussed is simply competition.  You probably know by now that you have a much better chance of achieving high search engine rankings if you can tightly focus keywords to match what potential customers are likely to search for.  Consider the case of a hypothetical camera store in North Royalton, Ohio that wants to promote digital cameras.  A quick check of Google shows 96 million results for the phrase "digital camera", but only 33 thousand for "digital camera North Royalton".

The second, less discussed but equally important reason for focusing more narrowly is that this will help to weed out irrelevant traffic.  If our camera shop focuses on sales and service to local customers, they are really only interested in customers in or near their city, so for them being ranked highly for the "North Royalton" search is in many ways better  than being ranked highly for the generic phrase "digital camera" because by focusing more narrowly they do not have to deal with hundreds or thousands of irrelevant inquiries.

How do you choose?
 
So, given that narrowly focused, targeted keywords are better, how do you choose them?  There are a couple of obvious formulas:

• Your product or service combined with your location --- as we saw in the digital camera example above, this can lead to a much narrower competitive field and also limit results to those you are more likely to be interested in anyway.
• Synonyms for your product or service.  One obvious example is a site that optimizes for "auto parts" --- it should not neglect "car parts" and parhaps even "autoparts."

Once you get beyond these two fairly obvious strategies, the next one to consider is the less clear-cut task of trying to figure out alternative ways that search engine users --- people who are often less familiar with your products and services than those in industry who define the standard jargon --- might talk about your offering.  Examples of this tend to seem almost trivial, but they can make a big difference in results.  Consider a fluid system component manufacturer that always refers to a particular product line as "quick connect fittings."  Many call these same products "quick disconnect fittings", so the manufacturer must find ways to incorporate that phrase too.  The standard advice for this task is to brainstorm as many alternatives as you can and then check them in a keyword tool such as the Overture keyword selector tool to see which are actually searched on.

Let your customers pick your keywords

A recent article at Web Pro World World suggests another approach --- one that you can use to augment the brainstorming described above one the site is up and running and being indexed by search engines.  The article describes creating a "positive feedback loop" with the search engine Google.  To try it, all you need is a website statistics package (such as iData's Visitrak Web analytics product or even a free tool like StatsCounter)  that will tell you, among other things, what search terms are being used to find your site. 

Once you know the terms being used to find your site, the goal is to look for terms that surprise you but are still relevant to your core market. Ideally, these would be terms for which your site shows up in the results pages, but for which it is not highly ranked.  For example, some of the terms that the iData site got click-throughs for today from Google were "seo suggestion", "how to implement seo with cms" and "cms systems google position".  We are currently ranked first in Google's results for the first two, so there is no room for improvement there.  However, we are fairly far down the list for "cms systems google position", so we could try to get better there. 
In order to improve, we just need to create some content that prominently includes the keywords we are trying to improve on and then link to that new content from the page we were already found for in Google --- the page that the user already clicked through to on our site.  In our case, this is an article about how using a content management system (CMS) relates to search engine optimization (SEO).  To improve our rankings for the phrase "cms systems google position", we would not make significant changes to the page that is already getting clicks -- after all, this page is doing OK, so why mess with it?  Instead, we would create a new page about using a CMS system to improve position in Google and then link to it from our existing page.  What this means is that the search engine, the next time that it crawls the site, will still find the page it already found and ranked, but now it will also find another page specifically targeted to the keywords we are trying to optimize for.  When this approach works, it tends to work quite well because we are basically reinforcing the engine's tendency to do something that it is already doing.

You can think of your own variations of this approach, but the key elements will be the same --- creating relevant content targeted to the words and phrases that you want to be found for and using a Web analytics tool to which terms uses are currently finding your site for.  From there, you can tweak and test, and -- if you are persistent and thorough --- watch your rankings improve accordingly.

About iData Technologies^TM

iData Technologies^TM is a software development and Internet business enablement firm based in Cleveland, Ohio. iData develops solutions designed to put the Web to work for our clients through Web marketing and promotion, business process automation and knowledge management. iData is the developer of the Synapse Web Suite^TM , a set of Web content management and application development tools including:

• Synapse Publisher^TM: A multilingual Web content management system, designed to put control of our clients' sites in the hands of content owners rather than IT staffs. 
• Synapse Search^TM: A fully integrated Search Engine Optimization toolkit that works with Publisher to allow iData clients to make their Web content their most powerful marketing tool. 
• Synapse CommLink^TM: a complete opt-in email communications platform that allows non-technical users to create, track and manage ethical opt-in email campaigns. CommLink^TM integrates directly with Publisher^TM to seamlessly manage the complete online communications channel 
• Synapse Event Manager^TM registration software. Event Manager^TM is a complete online events registration system that seamlessly integrates with iData's content management and opt-in email solutions.

To learn more about these software solutions and how iData can help your organization, contact iData.