Website keyword research
It's well known that using the right keywords is important in getting good search engine results. But how do you know which words to choose?
24 November 2010
While there are many factors governing how successful a website is in the search engine results, one factor is clearly important: the words you use on the page.
Some of these are often referred to as 'keywords' which can make them sound somehow technical. But no specialist skills are needed to select the right keywords for your website - just some common sense and intelligent use of a couple of free tools that Google itself makes available.
Common sense
The first step when choosing keywords is to apply some common sense. We need to think in the same way that the person who will be searching for our website thinks.
This isn't quite as easy as it sounds. Many companies describe themselves in ways which are not quite the same as the way someone outside of that company or industry might. As an example, many training companies position themselves as 'learning providers'. That's fair enough, it's a clear (if somewhat inflated) description. But, if someone is searching for a training course, they are far, far, more likely to type in 'training course' than 'learning provider'.
So, we've made a sweeping statement there; it sounds logical, so it should be true. But how can we prove it, so we're not making changes to our website based on guesses?
Google Trends
Well, it turns out that Google provides a handy little tool, called Google Trends, which can do just that. The primary use of Google Trends is to see which topics are 'trending' on the Internet right now. But a convenient by-product of this is that we can use it to check the relative popularity of different keywords.
The term relative is important. Google doesn't tell us exactly how many people are searching - but it does give us differences in search volume.
So, here's a chart comparing 'training course' with 'learning provider' in terms of search popularity.
We can clearly see that choosing to use 'learning provider' to describe ourselves is a search engine faux pas of extraordinary proportions. In relative terms, almost no one is using that phrase to search - 'training course' is the clear winner. (Because Google Trends measures popularity, it also shows news search results as well as standard search results within the chart.)
The results from the first chart take into account global searches since 2004. Since the use of English changes with time and terminology differs from country to country, we could do with a more localised perspective. Fortunately, Google Trends allows us to do this. We can narrow down our data to a specific year (or month) and a specific region.
Doing this, we can confirm that the results for the United Kingdom in 2010 still show that 'training course' is by far and away the more popular search term.
More common sense
But we have to apply still more common sense when thinking about our keywords. 'Training course' is such a popular search term that to expect to be ranked highly for those two words alone in Google is massively unrealistic. This is because Google isn't just looking at our search terms (the 'relevance' of the search) it's also looking at which sites are most likely to deliver the right results (the 'popularity' of the sites within the given search term).
What can we do about this? Well, people who use search engines aren't dumb. If someone wants a (for example) PRINCE2 training course in Cardiff, then they'll either know, or soon realise, that the search phrase 'training course' is far too broad to deliver anything that's relevant to them. These short phrases are often referred to as 'short-tail' searches, or, by the more realistic, 'trophy' phrases - because being top in them is a high target.
But people actually know that short-tail searches deliver a lot of irrelevant results - so they tend to use longer phrases, or 'long-tail' searches.
In our example, a typical search phrase might be 'PRINCE2 training course Cardiff' which is 'what I want' + 'where I want it'.
Only common sense can tell us this. If we were to check Google Trends to compare 'PRINCE2 training course Cardiff' and 'PRINCE2 training course London' it actually doesn't have enough of a volume of search data to deliver any results - and in any event, common sense tells us that even if the search volume in London were 600% greater than Cardiff, it's of no importance to us - since we're in Cardiff, we really don't want to attract website traffic from people in London.
We can refine our keywords even further by using the keyword tool in Google AdWords. So, we tell the tool to assess the phrases 'PRINCE2 training' and 'project management training' and it will helpfully deliver a list of related phrases which people are using. This is a smart tool, and can prompt us to include further words on our website (assuming our content is relevant) such as 'project management', 'agile', 'uk' and so on. We can even see that lots of people incorrectly search on 'PRINCE' and not 'PRINCE2' so we can, if we choose, target that in our copy.
It's clear that even with just a few minutes' work using these two tools, it's easily possibly to verify your choice of keywords and then expand the keywords you're using to attract a broader audience. Well, the two tools and a little common sense.
