I thought for my next few posts I would talk you through the three little initials that go around plenty of offices and that is SEO. It's a pretty big area and I'll talk you through the finer points over the next few weeks so I can help you get up to speed with making better use out of your site.
The reality is, SEO isn’t rocket science, lots of marketers make the mistake of seeing SEO only as a source of free traffic. It’s true, free traffic is the end result, but it’s not how SEO works. The real purpose of SEO is to help people to find you. To do that, you have to match the content on your website to what people are trying to find.
For example: Jeff sells custom hand made gloves. On his site, he shows how he makes the gloves by hand, often talking about the different yarn he uses. There’s not much competition for keywords relating to yarn, and Jeff is publishing lots of great content about it, so before long, he has front page rankings for several different types of gloves. Do you see the potential problem? The people searching for gloves most likely knit themselves, and it’s unlikely they’ll be interested in purchasing Jeff's gloves. He’ll get lots of traffic, sure, but none of the traffic will convert, because the visitors have completely different goals.
The lesson here: if you want SEO to work for you, you need to make sure your goals match the goals of your visitors. It’s not about traffic. It’s about figuring out what you want, and then optimizing for keywords that bring in visitors who want the same things. How do you discover what those keywords are? Simple: research.
For example: Jeff sells custom hand made gloves. On his site, he shows how he makes the gloves by hand, often talking about the different yarn he uses. There’s not much competition for keywords relating to yarn, and Jeff is publishing lots of great content about it, so before long, he has front page rankings for several different types of gloves. Do you see the potential problem? The people searching for gloves most likely knit themselves, and it’s unlikely they’ll be interested in purchasing Jeff's gloves. He’ll get lots of traffic, sure, but none of the traffic will convert, because the visitors have completely different goals.
The lesson here: if you want SEO to work for you, you need to make sure your goals match the goals of your visitors. It’s not about traffic. It’s about figuring out what you want, and then optimizing for keywords that bring in visitors who want the same things. How do you discover what those keywords are? Simple: research.
Sure, research is a little tedious, but it’s an indispensable part of finding the right keywords. You want to uncover keywords that:
Have a high search volume (people are looking for the keywords)
Have low competition (smaller amount of results will mean your chances of ranking higher improve)
Are supported by your content (the keywords are relevant to your site).
There are lots of tools to aid you in finding the right keywords, the most popular being Google’s Search-Based Keyword Tool. It provides results based on actual Google searches, and if you are logged into an AdWords account, it will also give you a list of keyword ideas customized to the site on the account.
Before you get too far though, let’s discuss an important concept for deciding how broad or narrow you want your keywords to be. It’s called, "The Long Tail." The Long Tail describes a phenomenon where lots of low traffic keywords can collectively send you more visitors than a few high-traffic keywords. For example, although Amazon may get thousands of visits from the keyword “DVD,” they get millions of visits from all of the individual DVD titles (i.e., Dark Knight, Toy Story, etc.). Individually, none of those titles get anywhere close to the traffic of a term like, "DVD," but collectively, their volume is a lot larger than any one keyword. How does the long tail apply to you? When you combine them all, your long tail (unpopular) keywords should make up roughly 80% of your traffic. So, when you’re researching keywords, don’t just focus on the ones getting massive amounts of traffic. Take note of some of the less popular ones too, and then incorporate them into your overall strategy.
Have a high search volume (people are looking for the keywords)
Have low competition (smaller amount of results will mean your chances of ranking higher improve)
Are supported by your content (the keywords are relevant to your site).
There are lots of tools to aid you in finding the right keywords, the most popular being Google’s Search-Based Keyword Tool. It provides results based on actual Google searches, and if you are logged into an AdWords account, it will also give you a list of keyword ideas customized to the site on the account.
Before you get too far though, let’s discuss an important concept for deciding how broad or narrow you want your keywords to be. It’s called, "The Long Tail." The Long Tail describes a phenomenon where lots of low traffic keywords can collectively send you more visitors than a few high-traffic keywords. For example, although Amazon may get thousands of visits from the keyword “DVD,” they get millions of visits from all of the individual DVD titles (i.e., Dark Knight, Toy Story, etc.). Individually, none of those titles get anywhere close to the traffic of a term like, "DVD," but collectively, their volume is a lot larger than any one keyword. How does the long tail apply to you? When you combine them all, your long tail (unpopular) keywords should make up roughly 80% of your traffic. So, when you’re researching keywords, don’t just focus on the ones getting massive amounts of traffic. Take note of some of the less popular ones too, and then incorporate them into your overall strategy.
I'll leave it there for the time being because it's a pretty hefty subject to get into for one post. I will bring you other key areas in my next post and hopefully an update on my Raspberry Pi project.
'Til the next time
James x
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