The Complete Guide To Keyword Campaigns

Keyword research.  Forgive the geek in me, but without a doubt this is one of my favorite things to do.  Even after all these years of doing this line of work, I still get excited about it.  To me personally it’s like a peek inside the thinking patterns of future visitors and then plotting a storyboard of how my site should be molded to the data I compile. Truth be told, being the control freak that I am over my SEO campaigns, I really like to keep my finger on it’s pulse from inception to ongoing maintenance at all points possible.  So to me, keywords truly is the life blood that makes the campaign alive and healthy.

That being said, I have found I need tools that are straight forward and quick.. don’t want to waste my time with overly complicated Firefox plugins or by using sites that require 200 parameters entered into a web form just to tell me what I could have figured out 10 minutes ago through automation.

Simplicity and efficiency rule the day in my world. So here’s my tools and why I like them:

Keyword Psychology

Note: Before I break into the tools for the job, a good hard look needs to be had in terms of the audience you’re going after.  There a few key metrics to consider which will adversely affect your approach.

Industry - For every industry out there, there are people that know it well and people who don’t so it’s up to you to cater to both sets.  To do this, consider what the average person would search for versus the industry slang and terminologies that an insider would know.  In my experience, the average surfers benefits more from landing on an optimized home page and the other primary public facing pages (i.e. about us, services overview, etc.) which will have a stronger focus on broad matched keywords versus the industry insiders who tend to drill deeper for their information which are usually longtail focused pages (i.e. white papers or other technical documents).  The balance is there, it’s up to you how to gently walk both sets towards a conversion point.

Geographic Factors - Is your site aimed at a town?  Specific demographic based off of the size of the city they live in?  A completely different country?  Depending on your aim, you may find yourself having to get familiarized with business elements and attitudes of the locale.  For example, if your website is targeting people in New York City but the product/service is located in some teeny-weeny town in Florida, then the tone of your web copy would be more fitting to a big city professional environment.  Basically you’re assessing what size business you will have to target and the kinds of people involved in that industry.

Gender - Most searches can’t be easily distinguished on male vs female queries.  There’s no reason why a woman wouldn’t go out and search for firearms for example.  She could be more interested in home protection and he could be more interested in recreational use at a firing range.  But some search queries are clear in origin and you can play that to your advantage in your web copy and color scheme for your site.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to point these out usually, but if you’re unsure which gender would be more keen to the sites message and/or service, your conversions will be the only indicator you got.

Education Level - Education plays a huge role in all of the above metrics and for obvious reasons.  Depending on the industry and the people who are in it and who is a consumer to it’s public offerings, your web copy will have to reflect the reading comprehension level.  For example, people searching for Ivy League colleges versus people searching for aftermarket import car parts are going to be presented in a totally different fashion.

Market Survey Data - If your whole marketing campaign is hinged on truly knowing your audience inside and out and as thoroughly as possible, then yes you will have to fork over some bucks to get the info you need to finetune to the right audience.  This is the motherload of data collection and is worth every penny in most cases.

Keyword Research Tools

Note:  There are a ton of tools out there worth trying.  Some are ideal on a case by case basis, others are general purpose.  These are the ones I use as general purpose but still have the scalability to dig deep.

Google Adwords External Tool - Gives me a first chance glimpse of which keywords are competitive or not.  Based off of my findings here, I now have the foundation for my 3 categories of keywords; high traffic (long term targets), mid traffic (interim goal), low traffic (instant traffic usually). Usually I do a broad search and take note of total & monthly search volume to determine traffic expectations.  Check out any relevant suggestions the tool has for other keywords that could be used.

Google Suggest - I know this made it out of the Google Labs a little while back, but for some reason I stay faithful to this url for it.  I dunno, that’s the purist in me I guess.  I take each of my keywords and one by one check out what kind of query volume numbers are behind them.  Also, you can get even more relevant alternative suggestions from here to go with your previous data.

Google Trends - Google Trends gives you a very important element to your keyword research;  trending and timing.  Let’s say that a large percentage of your phrases perform the strongest in the 4th quarter of this year and here we are in October… you got some serious link building to do and quick!  The other group is 3rd quarter of the year so you got some time to build up inbound links.

Also, it never really hurts to compare your keywords side by side and again, get a different model for search volume.  Usually I do no more than 3-4 keywords at once and save the graphs for trending analysis down the road depending on how closely worded the phrases are to each other (i.e. plurality, past vs present tense, etc.).

Wordtracker GTrends tool - Not much to say about this one besides getting an idea of daily search volume based off of whatever keyword you want to look up.  This tool gets used for my high ranking terms usually, mostly for specific reasearch needs.  So in short, you don’t really need to bother with it unless you want to.

Yahoo Buzz - This is one of those kinds of tools that is grossly misunderstood and greatly undercredited for what you can get out of it.  Bloggers and microbloggers have a tool that can give them reactive keyword analysis on the fly as something starts to go viral.  So right now as I type this, last night’s SNL skit with Tina Fey impersonating Sarah Palin at the VP debates is holding the top spot.  Since YB updates hourly, my daily social media marketing can be reactive and more elastic to trends.  RSS is a must if you plan on staying on top of trends as they develop.

Local Search

Note:This section focuses on the US since well.. that’s where I live.  Not trying to knock the methodology involved for other parts of the world or anything, but it will be different of course.  The general idea is easy to apply to any locale.

You can use the same methods above but this time work with what I call a “3 ring radius” approach.  Let’s say for example you’re doing a keyword campaign for a local auto parts store which has locations scattered about the state.  So instead of broad matching “auto parts” or “car parts” and hoping that it will cover your areas, you will need to associate broad terms with different locations.  Ring 1 would be the state, Ring 2 would be the city and as you guessed, Ring 3 would be neighborhoods where the stores are located.

So I would do Ring 1 as “Hawaii auto parts”, Ring 2 as “Honolulu auto parts”, and finally Ring 3 as “Kalihi auto parts”.  Local search is a big part of the picture so it would be foolish to leave it out.

Domain Research

Note: I only offer up one place to do this because of the scourge of domain capturing from shady or lesser known whois lookup sites, and the subsequent domain squatting that happens afterwards.  Nothing more frustrating than to have your ideal domain being held hostage for money by some scumbag with loose ethics.

Network Solutions WhoIs Tool - After getting an idea of your best keywords, go check to see if you can integrate them into the domain.  Besides finding out if your ideal domain is available or not, you can also get suggestions and alternatives that are available.  Most don’t make a lick of sense, but you can get some decent suggestions.

On Page Keyword Analysis Tools

Note: I don’t usually get too hung up on KEI since it’s debatable in terms of effectiveness, however I use these tools to gather hard data and not guesswork as far as how well my web copy is representing my keywords.

LinkDiagnosis - Get a nice bit of research out of this tool in terms of inbound linking for your existing site, potential client site and of course, the competition.  Does require that their Firefox plugin be installed to work fully.  Don’t worry, the plugin poses no threat.  Good way to find out who is linking to which page under which keyword phrase.

Keyword Density Cloud - Maybe because it just looks so nifty to see a cloud in use, but I’ve always felt pretty comfortable with the calculations this site produces.  Usually I use this on direct competitors as well as whatever I’m working on prior to public release.

SEODigger - I use this tool to find what keywords I rank for in the top 20 of Google.  Now before you say it, yes I do already know that the keywords returned are somewhat weird.  However because of that, I have been able to pull out some good longtail phrases and some interesting facts about how my web copy is being interperted by the SE algo’s.

Web Copy & Keyword Implementation

Note:  Each site is different as we all know, so there is never going to be a silver bullet or a surefire way to formulate how your copy should reflect your keywords.  However a few tools to help you write up sensible copy aimed at clarity and relevancy is an underlying principle for visitor trust.

Word Processor WITH SPELL CHECK! - OpenOffice is my tool of choice but use whatever you like.  I do have a basic formula that I use which consists of keyword instances against how many words are present.  On average I aim for 3 target keywords per page, 3 healthy paragraphs, 3-4 instances of each keyword and semantic use of header tags.  Please spell check your work, it really does matter.

Title, Meta, Header & Strong Tags - I’m not gonna dive in too deep on this but I will say this much;  your keywords have a place in each of these areas and it’s your job to make them fit as naturally as possible.  People debate character counts and on-page placement all the time, but it’s really up to you to experiment and find what works, piece by piece.

Menus & Internal Linking - Focusing on your internal linking structure is vital to (a) smart navigation for visitors, (b) relevancy to the page topic and focus, and (c) maintaining relevancy to any inbound links you create that use the same keywords and phrases.  So in short, keep it consistent across the board.

Keyword Rank Tracking

Note: What good is all this work if you can’t see what your rank is for each keyword?  There a ton of tools out there that let you do one keyword at a time or brute force multiple at once, but for the record, the first tool on this list is the clear winner in my book.

Rank Checker for Firefox - This plugin from Aaron Wall over at www.seobook.com is an essential.  In fact it’s the best damn keyword tracking tool out there that’s free and truly geared towards the SEO community as far as I’m concerned.  It’s lightweight, pulls from all 3 major SE’s and stays updated regularly.  Best things about this is that you can create profiles for each site, load in multiple keywords at once, schedule it to run X number of days on its own and most importantly, you can export it to CSV.  That last one is essential to tracking your SEO campaign as far as getting yourself up there where you want to be on a weekly basis.

Downside is that once you create a profile you can’t add in new keywords as you go along.  Instead you find yourself recreating profiles everytime you need to track new phrases.

DigitalPoint Keyword Rank Checker - Back when Google actually allowed us little people to sign up for their search API, and before they pulled the plug and replaced it with their useless AJAX search API, this service was essentially the same thing as Aaron’s Firefox plugin but with a web interface.  The only thing this is good for now is tracking Yahoo and MSN results via a custom PHP script they provide that you need to upload into the root directory of your site.

Multiple Google Datacenter Tool - Michael VanDeMar is one smart dude.  He put together a really intuitive tool that gives you your rank for whatever keyword/domain combo you like across multiple Google datacenters.  Interesting to find out which datacenter loves you the most.

Spreadsheet of some kind - You need some way to manage those CSV files and do weekly/monthly tallies of ranking averages.  I use OpenOffice, but that’s only because I use Linux.

Conversions & Keywords

Note:  Under the premise that broad keywords seem to bring more visitors in “shopping mode” and longtail keywords bring more in “buying mode”, this section focuses mostly on harvesting and understanding the longtails as part of your keyword strategy.

Google Analytics - Since one of the first things you should do is setup some kind of analytics for the site, you can catch your traffic and the keywords that landed them there early on.  Knowing where to look in GA will show you how your existing keywords are holding up as well as give you new ones to track as they bring traffic in. You’ll probably start to notice that longtail keywords give you steady conversions.  If so, you need to treat these keywords as little gold mines and start micro-ranking the ones that perform the best.  Here’s what you do;

While in GA, click the following on the main menu: Traffic Sources > Keywords, next click on the Conversions tab on the page.  Assuming you set up your goals properly for conversion tracking, you can now export out this info to CSV, convert it to a spreadsheet and sort the keywords alphabetically to start investigating recurrences of keywords that are either dead matches or really close in similarity.  Add the top performers to your list of keywords that you are tracking for rank.  This opens up a whole new area for you in terms of what people are searching for when they’re ready to buy.

Honorable Mentions

Add Wordtracker as a search engine in Firefox and (ugh) Internet Explorer

Wordtracker (Free 7 day trial) - If you’re the non-committal type, then you can get 7 days of test driving and pulling together some data.

Trellian Keyword Discovery (Free trial) - Not too shabby overall, but I find the real value of this tool is for PPC campaigns mostly.

Microsoft Keyword Research Tool - Directly tied into adCenter and also encourages you to only use Excel and some bohemoth Excel macro they made.  Haven’t used it, don’t plan to.

Overture Keyword Tool - RIP

Conclusion

Keyword research is where it all begins but not having the means for accurate and well planned keyword implementation is gonna hurt your efforts.  There is a lot to this whole thing, but doing the steps really does work as far as on-page SEO is concerned.  The more effort put into on-page in the beginning gives the off page marketing efforts more boost.  Your inbound links depend on the relevancy of the page they’re pointed at, so like I’ve said before, keyword consistency is key.

Got anything to add?  More tools perhaps?  I will happily update them into the list after I test them out in a real world working environment.  Sorry, but there are just too many tools that can’t perform as advertised and need to be put to the test before a thumbs up is given.