SEO: The Four Golden Rules of Keyword Research
By Anna Johnson on February 23rd, 2010For many Internet marketers keyword research is an essential first step in identifying a promising market niche, let alone optimizing a website to attract the most, qualified traffic. But there’s ‘keyword research’… and then there’s keyword research.
If you’re serious about building a profitable online business, and serious about search engine optimization (SEO), you’ll want to do keyword research without the inverted commas! To do that you need to what Eugene Ware, co-founder and ‘Daimyo’ (Head Samurai) of Noble Samurai, calls the four golden rules of keyword research.
Eugene Ware recently spoke at Ed Dale’s Coming Home Seminar in Melbourne, Australia (held February 19-21, 2010). A couple of years ago, Eugene’s company, Noble Samurai, took the Internet marketing world by storm when it released it’s intuitively simple, powerful and very nicely priced keyword research software, Market Samurai.
Market Samurai took – and continues taking – the pain out of a lot of the keyword research processes we all used to do manually or with a bunch of rather clunky tools. So, when it comes to keyword research, Eugene Ware knows what he’s talking about!
So what are Eugene’s four golden rules of keyword research? They are:
1. Relevance – ensure the keywords you identify are the keywords people search on in order to find the kind of website, content, products and/or services you offer. There’s likely to be a big difference between people who search on ‘tennis game’ and those who search on ‘tennis video game.’ You want to target keywords that are relevant to your business.
2. Traffic - your keywords must generate a minimum level of traffic to make your business viable. Also, keep in mind that ‘searches’ do NOT equal ‘traffic’. In other words, for every 10 searches on a particular keyword, the first ranked website on Google may only get four clicks, which means that only 4 people actually visit the website.
In fact, Market Samurai provides an estimate of traffic, as well as the number of searches in Google, based on a study performed a couple of years ago which estimated the following level of traffic (as measured in clicks) for each first page listing on the average search engine:
- #1 ranked search result: traffic/clicks = 42 percent of searches
- #2 ranked search result: 12 percent of searches
- #3 ranked search result: 8 percent of searches
- #4 ranked search result: 6 percent of searches
- #5 ranked search result: 5 percent of searches
- #6 ranked search result: 4 percent of searches
- #7 ranked search result: 3 percent of searches
- #8 ranked search result: 2 percent of searches
There’s no reason to believe these estimates don’t apply today. Not only do they highlight the difference that a higher ranking makes, but they also beg the question: if position #8 on the first page of results yields traffic based on only 2 percent of searches… how much traffic does a ranking on the second, third or fourth page get? Not much by comparison, that’s for sure!
3. Competition – beware of choosing keywords with excessively strong competition. For any given keyword, chances are you won’t be able to outrank competitors with old domains, high page ranks, tons of backlinks from authoritative sites, etc. So choose a battle – another keyword – you can win!
4. Commerciality – in this case, you want to optimize your site for highly commercial keywords – the kinds of keywords that paying customers use, not those used by ‘freebie seekers’. Here’s a big clue: these are typically keywords that advertisers (e.g. Google Adwords advertisers) pay big bucks for on a per-click basis.
Is choosing a market and doing SEO based on keywords all that important?
Yes, when you consider how much traffic most websites get – and are likely to get – from search engines. Despite the hoopla over social media and ‘branding’, for most Internet marketers the search engines will provide the vast majority of traffic to their sites.
A 2009 study by advertising network Chitika found that, based on 75,416,367 visitors to websites carrying Chitika ads, 91.56 percent of all traffic came from search engines.
How much traffic came from social media? Just 0.52 percent!
Now, you’ll know from looking at your website statistics how much traffic comes from where, and you might find that much more traffic is ‘direct’ or comes from sources such as Twitter and other social media sites, than from search engines.
But I bet most of it comes from search engines, right? Which means that it pays to follow Eugene Ware’s four golden rules of keyword research.
February 24th, 2010 at 5:15 am
thanks for the sharing such valuable information in regards of finding to keywords, that all of us know, it is very crucial part of the seo, may you send me the full detailed regarding to same points. good article…
February 24th, 2010 at 11:01 am
Very good introduction to internet marketing. I am using Market Samurai for two years and I must admit that it is simply awesome. The same applies to their videos. You need no manual, just watch their videos and you will get all the information needed to succeed on the web.
February 24th, 2010 at 11:43 am
Nice post. Actually it was created by Marketsamurai Team in the Dojo Series.
February 24th, 2010 at 4:42 pm
Good post. I agree with the title post being the most important, it is something that I always do. And the meta description being very important too, because a good meta description increases click throughs which leads to more traffic. The keyword meta tag I put in a token effort but I really don’t care about it. I have written a bit more on this topic http://drivingonlinesales.com/?p=281 and linked back to you.