A to Z of Keywords in SEO

What exactly are the keywords?

          Keywords are ideas and topics that define what your content is about. In terms of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), they're the words and phrases that searchers enter into search engines, also called "search queries." If you boil everything on your page — all the images, video, copy, etc. — down to a simple words and phrases, those are your primary keywords.

As a website owner and content creator, you want the keywords on your page to be relevant to what people are searching for so they have a better chance of finding your content among the results.

Why are keywords important?

               Keywords are important because they are the linchpin between what people are searching for and the content you are providing to fill that need. Your goal in ranking on search engines is to drive organic traffic to your site from the search engine result pages (SERPs), and the keywords you choose to target (meaning, among other things, the ones you choose to include in your content) will determine what kind of traffic you get. If you own a golf shop, for example, you might want to rank for "new clubs" — but if you're not careful, you might end up attracting traffic that's interested in finding a new place to dance after dark.

Keywords are as much about your audience as they are about your content, because you might describe what you offer in a slightly different way than some people ask for it. To create content that ranks well organically and drives visitors to your site, you need to understand the needs of those visitors — the language they use and the type of content they seek. You can do this by talking to your customers, frequenting forums and community groups, and doing your own keyword research. There are plenty of tools available like Google Keyword tool and other Keyword Planners.

What are long-tail keywords?

                 Keywords can be broad and far-reaching (these are usually called "head keywords"), or they can be a more specific combination of several terms — these are often called "long-tail keywords."  

Singular keywords might appear to be your ultimate goal as they often have temptingly high search volume. However, they usually have extremely tough competition. You may want your boutique clothing store to rank for "clothes," but it's going to be tough to rank above Shoppers Stop or Lifestyle.

On top of that strong competition, singular keywords can be infuriatingly vague. If someone is searching for "dog," you don't know if they want a list of dog breeds, information about dog food, a place to buy a dog collar, or just a site with cute photos of dogs.

Long-tail keywords usually have more clearly defined intent. For example, "best organic dog food for a puppy," or "inexpensive dog walkers Seattle." You'll also find that long-tail keywords have less competition, with room for a smaller site to break in and make their mark on the SERPs.

3 Types of Keywords

For better understanding of the Keyword tool, I'll define three types of keywords that serve a

purpose when setting up a site and it’s content. These three types are:

● Profit Keywords

● Information Keywords

● Pivot Keywords

Knowing about these three types of keywords, finding them and creating content for them will help create a much more compelling and ultimately also more profitable website.

Profit Keywords

                 A profit keyword is any keyword that will directly lead to a conversion. Here are some characteristics of profit keywords:

● Product name keywords and searches including serial numbers of products (the more specific, the better).

● Brand name keywords.

● Bargain keywords - anything containing modifiers like “where to buy”, “cheap”, “discount”, “coupon”, “best price” and so on.

● Review keywords and comparison keywords (e.g. “product name review” and “product A vs. product B”).

● Highly specific searches (specificity is a very rough indicator of commercial intent).

● A large number of paying PPC advertisers bidding on the keyword.

● A fairly high estimated cost-per-click for PPC advertising.

                                        You can  gauge the commercial intent of keywords by activating the AdWords CPC and AdWords Competition columns. The former indicates the estimated cost per- click that advertisers are paying and the latter shows how many advertisers are actively bidding on a keyword.

                                        Any keyword that meets several of these profit keyword criteria and happens to have a relatively low competition and high search volume, represents a great opportunity.

Profit Keywords on Website

                                      The profit keywords you find dictate the core content of your site. Create content rich, highly optimized pages for each profit keyword and run SEO campaigns to gain top rankings for those keywords (also see the Rich Content Optimization Guide for more information on how to create and optimize content).

                                      The homepage of your website should be directly related to a profit keyword and the pages based on profit keywords should be easily accessible from any page, through your site’s navigation (this can also be a factor contributing to the pages’rankings, since Google pays attention to internal links, when determining the importance of the pages on a site).

                                      Profit pages should always include strong calls to action. Make it as easy as possible for your visitors to take the action that leads to a sale/conversion.

Information Keywords

                          Information keywords make up the majority of searches performed on the Internet. An information keyword indicates that the person performing the search is simply looking for an answer to a question or looking for more information on a topic, without having any intention of buying anything. Needless to say, information keywords are not as profitable as profit keywords. Here are some characteristics of information keywords:

● Tutorial keywords including modifiers such as “how to”, “tips”, “tutorial”, “learn”, etc.

● Creative keyword modifiers such as “ideas”, “plans”, “examples” and more.

● Modifiers such as “resources”, “news” and any reference to news stories.

● Searches phrased as questions.

In some cases, information keywords indicate an interest in information and nothing beyond that. However, in some cases, information keywords can indicate that someone is in an early stage of a buying cycle, which looks something like this: 

                                  These are the common phases we go through, before making a purchase. Not all the steps are always included and the completion of the cycle can sometimes take days or weeks and at other times only take seconds. It’s important to keep in mind that someone's search for information today might translate into a purchase tomorrow. And this is something we can capitalize on.

                                   In terms of metrics, what matters most in information keywords is the search volume. Search volume simply indicates how many people are looking for an answer to a specific question or a specific tutorial.

It’s recommended that you create information about the most popular topics as well as about any “under-serviced” topics (e.g. a question that gets searched for often, but doesn’t have a really fitting answer in the current top 10 results).

Information Keywords on Websites

                            A very simple approach is to find information keywords that are related to your niche, product, service or site and use those to base additional content around. Create an FAQ page, create a video-series answering the most common questions, create pages with the basic, general information that newcomers to the niche might be looking for.

               Then, simply watch your analytics and over time, you’ll see that some of the information keyword content leads to a decent amount of conversions and you can start running SEO campaigns for those specific pages.

         You can use information keyword pages as “traffic catchers”, to attract additional visitors to your site. However, there are many more benefits to utilizing information keywords.

On the one hand, there are SEO benefits: Google tends to prefer larger websites over smaller ones and any link you get for your information pages will contribute to your overall site authority, in a small way.

Then, there’s social media: information keyword content is usually a lot more “shareable” than profit keyword content. Your articles about the “Top 10 Myths about [Your Niche]” is much more likely to spread through social media than, say, a product review.

Finally and perhaps most importantly, information keyword content can present great opportunities for creating brand recognition and building authority. People are more likely to buy something from that friendly person who made all those useful tutorial videos than from some random online store. Someone who’s been stuck in the early stages of the buying cycle forever might come back to your site to finally make a purchase, simply because they already feel comfortable on your site and have it bookmarked.

This type of branding takes time and effort, of course, but it can be the make or break of a business. Even in the short-term, a good amount of information content can help with your site’s authority and branding. 

Pivot Keywords

A pivot keyword is one that can attract traffic to your site, which you can easily redirect to one of your profit keyword pages. As an example, let’s use a hypothetical product review site in the (also hypothetical) “widgets” niche. Here are some related keywords:

It’s clear that “blue widget review” is a strong profit keyword, since it has a high search volume, low competition and the fact that it’s a product name + review keyword indicates that it’s profitable as well. So, one of our main pages will be optimized for “blue widget review”.

Now, there’s a second review-keyword, this one concerning red widgets. In case red widgets are on equal footing with blue widgets, we can simply treat it as another profit keyword and create another page for it. However, maybe red widgets aren’t nearly as good as blue widgets, or maybe there’s some other reason you don’t want to recommend them. In this case, it becomes a pivot keyword: you still create and optimize a page for the keyword “red widget review”, but the purpose of the page is to inform visitors that blue widgets are actually a better choice and direct them towards your “blue widget review” page. “blue widget coupon code” could also be a potential pivot keyword, if there are no coupons or there once were and now they’ve expired. In this case, instead of ignoring the keyword, create a page about it, point out that all coupons have expired and direct to your main review page. In many cases, you can pivot between price comparison and discount keywords.

Objections often also present opportunities to pivot. If you find keywords indicating buying objections like concerns about the price being too high, concerns about the product/service quality or concerns about safety, it’s better to address the issues on your site and then lead your visitors to your profit pages, rather than ignoring the objections.

Looking at the keyword examples above, once again, there are two more keywords: “yellow widget review” with a very low search volume, can either be used to pivot visitors towards blue widgets or just be added for completion’s sake.

More products make a review site more credible. And of course, “widget tutorial” is a perfect example of an information keyword that should be made use of, due to it’s high search volume.

Site Structure

When planning a new website or the expansion of a site, you can create 4 groups of keywords:

1. Profit Keywords

2. Information Keywords

3. Pivot Keywords

4. Useless Keywords

The useless keywords are all of those that you will not create any content for and won’t optimize for. Each page type contributes to your site in it’s own way. The profit keywords attract traffic that converts quickly, the pivot pages (of which there are usually not many) attract some additional traffic that also benefits your profit pages and the info pages, while usually not passing that much traffic to your profit pages, add to your site’s overall authority and help with authority and branding as well as social media sharing.

Your investments, in terms of time and expenses, should always be focused on your profit pages. That is where you need to make the biggest SEO efforts and that is where most of your split-testing and optimization efforts should be spent. Pivot keywords are not very common. If you see them, make use of them - most people don’t, so it’s a way to get an advantage. The information part of the site is the ideal part to keep building slowly. Having regularly updated content on a site also translates into an SEO benefit, which is one more reason to make use of information keywords. While the information pages are not as important as the profit pages, don’t make the mistake of cutting corners too tightly. It’s better to have no informational content than to add low-quality, junk content to a site to “pad it out”. This is a strategy that worked quite well before the Google Panda updates, but now does more harm than good.

Conclusion

Keyword research can do more for us than show us where the money-making opportunities are. At it’s most basic, keyword research is a way to gain insights into what people in our target market look for, want and think about. As such, we can use what we learn from keyword research to influence many aspects of our site, beyond just our profit pages and SEO campaigns.