doing keyword research the smart way

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KEYWORD RESEARCH

If you aim at nothing, you're sure to hit.

Know your searcher

This one I’m going to be talking a little bit

more about keyword research and that sort

of thing. The first thing you need to do is

make sure you know your searchers. The

biggest thing and I suppose this goes back

to the idea that we were talking about with

competition, that is are we looking to go

for something with the most amount of searches? The most amount of searches doesn’t

necessarily mean that’s the keyword we want to be going after. You guys may or may not

be familiar with buying phrases versus browsing phrases.

If someone’s on Google and they’re typing in camera, they’re more of a browser. They

don’t know what it is they want yet. They’re just doing a little bit of initial research to find it

out. When you compare that to someone who’s searching for the Sony Handycam hdrs11,

which is our camera, once they’ve typed in that, they’re pretty much clearly raised their

hand in Google and said, this is what I’m looking for. Those type of keywords. Although

you’ll get a lot less competition on those and you’ll get a lot less searches, they can really

pay off. They’re the ones that are the buying phrases and they’ll convert at a much higher

rate.

Whenever we do any sort of optimization both on page and thinking about the landing

page, I always like to put myself in the shoes of the person doing the search. So I think, that

is a really smart way to think about things where you say, if someone is typing this

keyword into Google, imagine yourself sitting in their body, imagine yourself thinking what

they were thinking and what is it that they are looking for? Basically you want to meet

them at the point that they are already in their mind. It is like you want to join the

conversation that is already in their head. They’re having a conversation when they are

typing something in and you want to make sure that you meet them at that point.


Site structure

I’ll just talk a little bit about site structure

and the way we actually choose these

keywords. This is a little bit of an overview

and then we’ll delve into it a little bit

deeper. This is the way that we structure a

site. Let’s say we have a new client who is

coming on board who we are about to work

with. The first thing that we do is, we build a big list of keywords. We look at what the

competition is doing, we find as much as we can and I’ll talk about some of the ways we do

some of that research. You’re looking to build a big list of keywords and then what we do

is we take those keywords and we build this structure that I talk about here.

There are three tiers. The first tier is just

going to be your primary money phrase,

and we’ll talk about that. Your second tier,

these are more almost like category pages.

We can have a look at some examples like

Planet 13. Let’s say the primary money

phrase for Planet 13 is band merchandise.

That’s a more broad term. Typically speaking when I go for those first tier, it’s like, if you

had a magic wand and you’d rank it, what word would that be? That’s going to be that

term.

The second tier sometimes can be more competitive or less competitive than the money

phrase. This money phrase I try to do an analysis in my head. It’s a little bit of an art and

science when it comes to keyword selection. I try to think about the most amount of traffic

I can get that is also going to be quite highly targeted. Someone typing in band

merchandise is looking for music related things. So if I can provide them with that, then

that is a good phrase there. The category pages can be similar phrases, but at least on

Planet 13, they are more categories, things like band t-shirts, band stickers, band patches,

they are more like categories.

The third tier is where you break out and this is where you have long tail phrases. This is

where you have the full product name. That might be Metallica black t-shirt or something

like that. That’s the structure.


SEO really is a game of lasers and this is something I got from Leslie Rohde, for those of

you who don’t know, he knows his SEO material. I just recently had a good chance to catch

up with him. He talks about the idea of SEO as very much targeted. Each word that we’re

going after, you’re really just going after that one phrase. It’s not like we’re shining a

flashlight and we’re going to pick up all of these different phrases. Each page that we

create is very much just a little laser target that we’re going after. That’s partly why big

sites win, because they’ve got so many targets out there.

You imagine that every page that you create is a ticket in the search engine lottery. The

more tickets you have, the greater chance you have of winning the search engine lottery

and getting a client to come and visit your website. The more pages the better.

Keyword art & science

I talked a little bit about the way I’ll start off.

I’ll start off by doing some general

brainstorming. If I know the niche, I’ll try

and come up with the best words that I can.

Everybody’s got a little bit of insight there.

The next thing I’ll do is, I’ll head over to the

competition to see what the competition is

doing. I’ll show you the way that I do that and you can go view page source and look at

some of their meta descriptions and also the meta keywords to find out what keywords

they’re targeting. Navigate around their website and all the while, all I’ve got is an Excel

document and I’m building this big list of keywords as best I can.

Then I’ll use the Google free keyword tool. I will talk about some paid tools as well. I’m

going to try and give you guys at least the free option. A lot of these keyword tools just

pull their data straight from the Google free keyword tool anyway and they just repackage

it up and give you a few other fancy bells and whistles. If you can feed back the

information Google is giving back to itself, Google is basically coming to you saying, when

you type in a phrase, here are the other phrases that we think are important in reference or

in relation to the keyword that you have typed in.

We might as well give them back what they have told us is important. There are two

different ways. A lot of people don’t actually use the website suggested tool which is in the

free Google tool which I’ll show you. The first step you want to do is build a big list. Let me

head over and I’ll actually show you just a couple of those different things.


The first thing I need to do is head over to Google.

Now let’s look at band merchandise. We’re up number

1 and number 2, dual listing. Let’s have a look at the

competition. I will go view, page source and we will

have a look at some keywords here. They are going for

touring and things like that. We don’t sell touring

merch. so much so I don’t know if I’ve targeted some

of these. Also it gives you a little bit of insight as to whether or not they know what they’re

doing as well. I personally wouldn’t stuff so many keywords in here. Most people do this, it

comes from very old school SEO.

Then you can even navigate around their website and try and have a look at their different

categories. You can have a look at some of the different categories and find out some of

the keywords that way. That is the first thing that I’d do.

The next thing that I do is, I head over to the Google free keyword tool. The first thing we

can do is type in band merch. I actually found out the other day, a lot of these, you know

how they get you to type in the characters there, you know how Google is scanning in a

whole lot of public domain works and are getting some copyright issues, a lot of those

capture forms, what they doing is taking words they don’t know what it is yet and they get

people to read it and type it in and it is intelligently analyzing what the keyword is. It’s like

human reviewing.

What we’ve done here is looked for band merch. I’ll try

and pick up some of the keywords here. Obviously you

want to type in any of those big broad phrases that

come to mind to try and drill down a little bit deeper. I

will talk about, a little bit further in this presentation,

what keywords to look at for how many searches there

are. One thing you might want to do though, is just

make sure you use the hide/show columns and you just want to make sure you make some

of these columns show. The main ones that I look for are the price one, earnings per click

but the volumes is the main one you want to have a look at.


Usually I’ll scroll down a little bit further and to also ‘other keywords to consider by

relevance.’ These keywords are almost like a lateral keyword search. It’s not like they’re

drilling down really deep to band merch. and variations of band merch. These are lateral

keywords. So I will try and pick out some key ones from there and that will help to keep

building my list and I’ll keep feeding them back into Google. The aim of the game is to just

keep building and get a big list.

How many searches?

How many searches? Once you’ve got this

list, obviously you want high searches, low

competition. That’s the Holy Grail. The way

that you check whether or not there is

competition is you just head over to Google,

you type your keyword phrase in with

quotes around it, so that you’re looking for

that exact phrase match and then you’ll find how much competition you are up against.

That’s when you’re looking for the sweet spot and I am giving you the way that you’d do it

if you didn’t have any paid tools. I use Market Samurai which is a very good tool for

analysis and I sure some of you use.

One thing to bear in mind is those numbers, the search volumes, those numbers that

Google provides you, use them as an indication. They’re not even close to how much traffic

you’re going to get. Freetradingsystems.org, we rank number 1 for trading systems. It’s

quite a competitive term, especially with stock market related things. I think they say there

are about 120,000 searches. Off that particular keyword we don’t get more than a couple of

thousand searches a month. That is worlds apart. You could probably say you get around

10% to 20% like they say, but that’s probably not a good example using the one I gave just

there. Bear that in mind and use it more as an indication, but don’t think that is the

number of searches you are going to get.

There really are no hard and fast rules when it comes to keyword research. You’ll just get

better at it over time. It varies from market to market. I talked about trying to compare the

mortgage industry to mating habits of mosquitoes in Ethiopia. They’re worlds apart

obviously. You can’t go for the same volume of keywords in that very small niche

compared to something like mortgages.


As a general rule of thumb, depending on who I’m working with, for my first primary

keyword, the keyword right up at the top, I like to see about 5000+ searches. I remember

when we used to do our stock market seminars, and people would say, what is the value of

your moving average, which is this indicator you have? As soon as you tell them it was a

21, they’d scribble down the numbers as though they were magic numbers. These aren’t

magic numbers, they are just guides. I want to make sure I've got something with a little

bit of weight.

Question: Is that broad match search or phrase match search?

That’s not so much competition, that’s how many searches. I usually do the broad terms. I

only do the phrases when I’m looking at the competition. Depending on what the

keywords are, sometimes you’ll pick up variations. I’ll go after band merch. and sometimes

I’ll get merch. band as well. It’s probably not a good example of swapping it around, but

there are a lot of keywords where it doesn’t really matter if you swap that syntax or that

order around. It’s going to be useful searches.

In the second tier, I’ve written 2000+, but I’ll go for keywords that are as competitive if not

more competitive than that primary money phrase. The primary money phrase is looking

for that balance between, yes, I think it is going to convert really highly, and yes there is

also large volume of searches. For that second tier, that’s why I don’t mind going higher.

Look for variance as well. Depending on the client we’re working for, we will go for some

lower hanging fruit and we’ll go for some more competitive things, because we want to

get some quick easy wins and that way we can get some momentum going. That money

can then fund more link building and so on.

For the third tier, the longer tail things, usually I like to see some searches there, maybe

around fifty. Depending on, if you’re going for local markets, sometimes you won’t even

find a match, it will come back with no information. I mean if you’re going for dentist

South Yarra or dentists Greensborough, dentist Greensborough is probably not going to

come up with many searches. That’s not to say I don’t go after it. In the local market a few

extra users or a bit of extra traffic is going to convert at a much higher rate.

When we work with the dentist, we might have doubled his traffic and even his numbers

are quite low. An increase of twenty or thirty people a day for a local business is quite high

because of the rate at which they convert. That is the whole buying phrase versus broad

match.


1st tier

Go for your money phrase, typically two to three

words. I wouldn’t go more. One word is going to

very hard to go for, typically speaking. Also I like to,

when I can, unless it is a client who already has their

domain name registered, if it is a business I’m

starting, preferably I like to get that keyword within

the domain name. That is just good practice. That’s

why I say go for two or three words.

.net, .org and .com are the three ones that I will go for. Some of the other domain name

extensions don’t do so well because when they were launched you had all these

domainers who came out and registered all these golden money phrases, thinking that

they’d be able to resell them at a later date. You go to that extension and so many of the

domain names are just parked landing pages. So that whole sub section never really took

off. So I try and focus on those top level domain names.

For that first tier keyword you want to go for high traffic, high converting with good

competition. For Planet 13 band merch. For Melbourne SEO Services, you think about the

psychology behind why we selected Melbourne SEO Services. Firstly we went for

Melbourne SEO Services a nice long tail phrase that will return the client that we want who

is looking for exactly what we are after. It is relatively low hanging fruit. We only launched

the company at the start of this year and already we’ve got position number 1 for that

word. We’re bouncing around in the local search, but local search is a different game unto

itself.

The reason we chose that is that now we can break it down and go after the more

competitive phrase which is SEO services. So we’ve got Melbourne SEO Services, now we’re

going for SEO services which is that more competitive phrase. That is just a little bit of the

thought process behind there.


2nd tier

The second tier, going for those categories,

services or money phrases, so this is coming

back to some of the guys here have got

paint protection shops and the ceremonies,

both of those. You want to think of what the

money phrases are or the different services

that you do provide.

So you might provide celebrant Melbourne. That might be one of those phrases that you

go after on these second tier. Then you can try and maybe go for the area which might be

geographic location plus keyword. Try and go for that first. Then when you get that, go for

the more competitive phrase. When you’re building links, you’ve been building links with

that keyword in it anyway. So that is a better way to go. I don’t mind going for high

competition things or even higher than that first tier.

For example some of the ones that we use are band t-shirts, band stickers, band buttons,

they are all category related things. For Melbourne SEO Services we have SEO company,

SEO training, SEO expert. That is comparing an e commerce site with a services based

website.

3rd tier

For the third tier you want to make sure you

drill down a little bit deeper. This is where I

will take a lot of what those categories are

and I’ll try and find out what are the sub

keywords underneath that and I’ll go for

those really longer tail phrases. Remember,

for tier one we’re going to have one

keyword. For tier two, we’re going to have about ten keywords. This is plus or minus, these

are rough numbers. Tier three, I say maybe go for ten or twenty but ultimately these tier

three pages, we’re just going to keep on building.


SEO now is a game of volume. It used to be you could rank a website with five pages and

you still can for very non competitive terms but really now, to do some serious damage,

you want to just keep building pages. Go for those longer tail things with geographic

locations built in, product names and things like that are also good. Just keep building that

list. On Planet 13 Metallica sticker, Metallica black t-shirt and for Melbourne SEO Services

on our blog that’s where we use building our pages to go for those longer tail phrases.

We’ll go for things like guide to selling a website, video marketing SEO and WordPress on

page SEO.

You can see those longer phrases and if you visualize that, and this is one of those things

as well where in the back of the notes, you guys have got that little workbook. I’d probably

suggest when you get a moment, you can scribble down, start to plan out in your head, all

of this is already starting to sink in now. I just want to make sure that you start to map all

this out. Obviously you don’t have your keyword research tools with you right now, but

you know the broad phrases, you know if it’s your industry.

Map out site structure

So you want to map out your site structure.

The easy way to map out and select what

keywords you’re going to go for, here is the

easy way. The easy way is do a broad match.

You have your big long list of keywords, do

an exact match, find out how much

competition you’ve got. Delete anything

over 500,000. Yes, that’s a magic number, you might want to write that one down. That’s

like a ballpark number. Then just go for the highest search, rank it by highest search. So

that way you’re effectively stripping out all the really competitive things and you’re left

with the highest search items. Try and sort down from there. That is the easy way to do

some basic filtering to figure out where you’re going to target.

Depending on whether or not we’re working with a client or whether we’re doing

something on our own website, if we’re working with a client and they’ve already got a

website and we’re going in there and doing their SEO for them, we’ll map out what their

site already looks like. Then we’ll try and match the keywords that just go, based on

whatever the topic of the page is.


So we’ll choose for the dentist, root canal. There is a page on root canals and the

treatment. We will say, let’s choose that keyword because the page is already about that

and it is just an easy match as opposed to creating a page from nothing.

If we’re creating our own site and we’re mapping out the structure from scratch, that’s

when I’ll draw a diagram and I’ll do that right from the get go and I’ll plan out my method

of attack. I’ll have a quick look at the two websites, Planet 13 and Melbourne SEO Services.

For Planet 13, we’ll talk a bit about little tags later and

I’ve probably gone a little bit overboard with this one

in the length of it. Usually I like between three and five

keywords, but I’ve gone a little bit longer here. You can

see the keyword I’ve gone for here is band merch. I

went for the slightly longer tail version as well which is

official band merch, so I can pick up both of those.

The primary one we’re going after is band merch. Then the sub category things are here.

These pictures are linked but I’m also having the anchor text beneath it as well. That way, if

you guys have watched the video and we’re talking about internal reputation, we’re telling

Google what this page is about. We’re sending a link to that page with the appropriate

anchor text. That’s why underneath I’ve got the keyword as the anchor text. So they’re

more like my sub categories and also we did some linking down the bottom for some of

these second tier keywords.

Now if we were to drill down even deeper, we have the example Blink 182. Because we’re

using an e commerce website and I didn’t want to hand do the title tags for every product

because we’ve got over two thousand products online, we built it so that we could auto

generate the title tag based on information that it pulls from things like the product

description, and the category and things like that. So this is automatically built. I’ve added

the word cheap in there because that is a bit of a modifier.

Sometimes people search for cheap and it’s a good way to come up for some extra longer

tail keywords. The primary keyword we’re going for here is Blink 182 patch. I’ve also gone

for hottest Blink 182 merch, but the main one we’re going after here is Blink 182 patch. I

use a pipe because it looks nice. Some people use a colon. I do it just to break the two

sections if I’m trying to make two points. I could have got away with saying cheap Blink

182 patches, but I also wanted to sneak another keyword in there, Blink 182 merch.


This is a pretty good rule of thumb. If you follow going along this website, you should be

pretty much alright. Granted though, I did build this about four or five years ago now, so

we have evolved slightly.

If you want to have a look at what we’re doing now,

if we head over to the Melbourne SEO Services,

we’ve got our primary phrase which we talked

about, Melbourne SEO Services and then SEO

Services. I’m not worried so much about the no

follow tags anymore. I’m still making sure that I’m

using appropriate anchor text where possible but I

let the link juice fly.

The best thing down below, if I move my mouse over the top, you can see some of the

keywords we’re going after: SEO company, SEO specialist, SEO training. These are all our

second tier keywords that I was talking about. Let’s go to SEO training which will talk a

little bit about the workshop. You can see SEO training workshops. We’ve optimized this

page for that. Then SEO blog as well, this is where we go for the third tier longer tail

material. When you compare e commerce to something like a service based thing, I think

every service based business really should develop blogs so that way you can keep

building pages like I talked about. You want to be constantly building pages. Google likes

to see that growth.

That’s the way we do it under a services based site. Then on Planet 13, it’s all about just

building more pages, the more pages you create by adding new product. Those pages will

automatically get created.

1st & 2nd tier analysis

We talked about some easy ways you can

do that analysis, which is just knocking out

those 500,000+ in the competition. That’s

one way to do it and then rank it based on

searches. If you want to be a little bit more

advanced and take it a little bit deeper, do

that first.


Map out what keywords you’re going to go after, draw up a little map and then the next

stage what you might do is type those keywords into Google and look what the

competition is doing. For that keyword that you’ve just identified, how competitive is that

phrase, and how much of a chance do you think you’ve got going after that phrase?

What I’ll do is, I’ll do a search, let’s say for SEO services. That’s probably not the best

example because obviously SEO companies are going to be very competitive. Let’s take

something a lot less competitive, ballet dancing. You might search for ballet dancing

within Google. Have a look what the competition is, using the domain Whois tool you can

find out how old the domain name is. That plays a part in ranking factors. You can also

have a look at the page rank. I use Firefox. I’ve stopped using Internet Explorer, it’s a buggy

piece of software. Firefox is a lot better. They’ve got this plug in called Search Status which

is that thing in the top left hand corner, I used it in the initial training videos. There are a

few cool things in there, one of which is it will tell you what the page rank is for the

website.

If I go into a new market that I’m going after, and I look at page number 1, and I look at the

first person on top and they have a page rank of 4 and then I go to the last one and they’ve

got a page rank of 3 or 4 and it is quite solid throughout, I know that is very competitive. I

don’t mind so much though if I go into a phrase and then the first one is PR6 but then it

drops off really quickly. What you’re looking for is the speed at which the page rank drops

off because that will give you an indication of how much competition there is in the search

material.

That said, you can get a pretty good idea as to what your competition is by going and

having a look at the page. Have they done the basics? Do they know their on page

optimization? That is a really basic one, especially in local business. Nobody’s doing on

page optimization yet; for SEO, that’s just 101. You can also head over to how many pages

are indexed within Yahoo. I talked about that in the pre training videos. Use the Yahoo!

Site Explorer.

You can also have a look at the number of back links to a particular website. The way that

you do that is with the Yahoo! Site Explorer as well. It’s got two options right up at the top.

You can have how many pages are indexed. For index I’ll use Google. I’ll use Google to see

how many pages are indexed and then for the number of back links I’ll use the Yahoo! Site

Explorer.


The lucky, last thing that you can do, and this is more so if you’re going after a really

competitive market, you can use something like Market Samurai to analyze those back

links of your competitor. So take your top one or two competitors and then I can show you

during the break, but it is quite easy, drop in a domain name and you can see what the

anchor text is of all the back links that that back link has built. If they know SEO, they will

be building back links to their website with the right anchor text. That will give you an

indication. You might say, oh yes, this is a very competitive market. I’m going up against a

.gov site for a particular phrase.

When you actually look at the back links that they have built to that .gov site, the only

reason that page is ranking is it’s a .gov site, not because they’ve built any links back to it.

You can very easily knock a .gov site off because they’re not going to be doing SEO. So you

can also do some of that back link analysis as well. This is to earn extra points. When it

comes to local business you probably don’t need to worry so much about these things.

Depending on what your client is, I wanted to tell what I do, and then if you go for the

basic one, you will be fine.

Domains

The next thing we’ve got is your domain

name. If you’re just starting out, and you

haven’t decided what niche or business

you’re going for, once you pick that niche,

the best thing you can do is register that

domain name as early as possible and put a

piece of content up there on topic. You

want to let that domain name age.

What I used to do when I operated in lots of different markets, at the start of the year, I’d

plan out what I was going to do for the year. I’d go register all of those domain names. I’d

get an article written from Need-an-article, put it up on the page and then just send some

basic links to it. That way it gets indexed, it’s aged and it’ll just make things easier later on

down the track when we start to build links. We don’t have to worry so much about

holding back the speed at which we’re building links because we’ve had a chance to age

that domain name.


I’ll go for .com, .net and .org. Those are those top level sites we talked about. I’ll go for one

to three keywords typically and I’ll avoid hyphens as well, they just look spammy. There has

been discussion as to whether or not having a hyphen in a domain name will affect how it

will rank and ages back it did matter. Some of my domain names like trading-secrets-

revealed.com is one of my domain names and I registered that ages ago. I probably didn’t

load enough keywords in there but it does rank quite well for money management, which

is the keyword we’re going after and it does have dashes in it.

But from a branding point of view and how much easier it is when I’m standing up here

and say melbourneseoservices.com, it’s much easier for you to type that in and go the

domain name than it is to say go to www.meta-formula, and that’s a dash, not an

underscore and having to clarify that. So where you can, avoid hyphens. One to three

keywords and you want to try and go for keyword rich.

That’s why I went for Melbourne SEO Services because it has the keyword in the domain

name. Part of the reason for that, and this is something I talked about in the old SEO

Method, is when we’re building inbound links, a lot of links that you’re going to build back

to the website are going to have the URL as the anchor text for that link that we’re

building. If your domain name has the keyword in it, when you’re building links for the URL

you’re effectively building links back with the appropriate anchor text as well because the

keywords are in the domain name.

That might have gone over your head, but watch the videos and that will sink in a little bit

deeper. The only exception is if it is a brand name. Planet 13 is a brand name. We didn’t go

after bandmerch.com although we did register official band merchandise and we used that

for some other purposes. Unless you’re going for branding and also the client, the dentists,

he already had that domain name and that is his business name so it is ok to use it in that

point in time. We can do a lot of things. We can still rank a page without having the

keyword in it but it just makes it a little bit easier.

In reference to that as well, registering domain names, later on when we get into the

section where we talk about the SEO Method, we’ll talk about how we actually structure

this whole link building thing. One of the components is building your own network of

sites to help control the links that you’re sending back to your website. It’s a good idea,

early on in the year, to register those domain names now. So if you’ve already got what

your primary niche is, go ahead and register three or four other domain names. We can talk

about what we can use them for later, but try and get keyword rich domain names.


Go for .com. I don’t stress so much about the .com.au. I know I probably should because

now we’re doing a lot more work with local business and it does have a big impact with

local business. We’ve just registered melbourne.com.au. In hindsight I probably would have

gone for the .com.au if I’d thought a little more about it because we’re going after that

local business. But it doesn’t really bother me so much, you can overcome that with

enough links. It’s like a little bit of an arm wrestle.

Question: My question is about the .com and the .net before. If I'm going to register a domain, and say it is Domains, and domains.com is taken. But domains.net or domains.com.au is not taken, so I can go and register that because it's specific obviously. But would it be better if I register something like thedomains.com?

Kind of like adding a little modifier in there.

Question: In your experience, if I were to choose one or the other, which is better?

When you choose between ‘domains ‘or ‘the domains’, I would choose whatever sounded

better from a branding point of view. When you get down to adding the word the, it’s not

like adding the word is going to dilute the keyword density or anything like that of the

domain name. It’s more what sounds better.

Your own goldmine

The other thing to do as well for building

keywords, if you haven’t installed Google

Analytics on your website, you need to do it.

It’s definitely something you need to go

study, it’s just 101. The next thing you need to

do is set up goal tracking. Most people don’t

set up goal tracking in Google Analytics. It’s

quite easy to do. You just put a little bit of

code on whatever your conversion page is.

Basically you then get Analytics to be able to tell what keywords are driving traffic to your

website and what keywords are converting. Once you know what keywords are converting,

then you can do things like, ok maybe I go after the pay per click market because I know

that keyword is going to convert for me and the more traffic I can get to my website with

that keyword the better.


When you use Google Analytics you can jump in the back end and can have a look at what

keywords people are already using to find you. That’s another way to continue to mine

your own data. You want to try and identify quick and easy wins. I’m all about going for

ones you are already getting some good traffic to, but it may not be in position number 1.

It might only require you to build a few more back links to that and it’ll push you up to

number 1.

The difference in traffic between position number 3 or position number 5 and position

number 1 is a factor of five or six. I don’t know the statistics off the top of my head, but

you’ll get so much more traffic being number 1. If you’re already getting traffic from a key

phrase and it’s not in position number 1 but it’s on page number 1, I’d go after that

keyword first. So that is why you want to install Google Analytics. Once you install Google

Analytics, you can start to identify what keywords are driving traffic and where they’re

ranking.

With e commerce, here’s another cool thing I did with

Planet 13. I’m quite happy with myself on this one.

What I did, very early on I spoke to the Web guy and

the search area is something we installed, and in the

back end, when anyone types a search in, it’s logging

that keyword. So I know what keywords people are

searching for on this site. It’s not necessarily how they

found the website, this is what they’re searching once they’re here. This is gold for us, so

much so that I thought I’d get even more tricky. I then started to take that data and feed it

back to the site. What you’ll have are top bands that automatically update based on what’s

hot.

If a band is touring, we are so on the cutting edge to know what’s happening in the scene,

based on what kids are searching for. People come to this website and some of these

bands will pop up, All Time Low, and Escape the Fate and you will say, why are they

popping up now? You might not have realized but they have just brought out a new

album, they’ve just started touring, they’ve done whatever.


Feeding this information back into it, basically it takes all the data that is getting fed into

the search bar, then it analyzes what is the most searched in the last month and then it

feeds that into those top bands. Then you scroll down to Our Featured Products and then

picks six of the top featured bands and then chooses a random product from that keyword.

Basically, this is what’s hot, this is what kids are looking for, and then we’re feeding it back

to them. That’s just the idea of using your own data and then funneling it back in. For

those of you who are doing e commerce, I just gave you an absolute nugget and you may

not have even realized it. That was a big one for us.

Question: Did you see an uptake in sales from that technique?

Did we see sales from doing something like that? Because we’re doing so much, we’re

throwing a lot against the wall, you see some people and they’ll say, I just made this slight

tweak on my page and look how much better I’m doing in the rankings. But if you’re doing

all these other things, there is no real way for you to isolate what’s causing the increase.

At the point in time that we were doing that, we were doing a whole lot of on page SEO,

we were doing off page SEO, we were adding new products, there were so many different

factors there. It would be too hard for me to isolate. That said though, just by

understanding our market, there is so much value in that.

Question: Do you do any sort of crazy tracking where you'd be able to say, yes, people are clicking on featured products?

The only tracking we do, we don’t do Crazy Egg, but Google has that thing where you can

do a site overlay. It’ll show you what percentage of clicks are going through to certain

pages and we keep an eye on that. It’s all about keeping on feeding the information back

to itself.

For Planet 13, I analyze the categories, which ones are getting the most clicks. Then I

reorder it based on what is getting the most clicks. Band t-shirts and gloves and patches

even used to be down the bottom. They used to be down with the key chains and girls’ t-

shirts. But we found those ones weren’t converting as high, so we just started swapping

things around based on what people were clicking on.

Question: Just going back actually in regards to your optimization there of the search area where categories are automatically generated. Do you measure all the metrics such as time

spent on site or anything like that or exit rates and bounce rates to actually see whether that's alleviating some visibility problems?


We keep an eye on bounce rates. This is all through Google Analytics, that’s why if you

haven’t installed Google Analytics you need to. We do look at bounce rates and improving

that over time. Bounce rate is when someone actually visits the page and they don’t find

what they want and they leave on the same page.

I’ve got pages upwards of 70%, have some sometimes lower, it really does just depend.

You can find out where you’re at and just try and constantly improve what you’re doing.

The best thing you can do is throw up whatever you can and just improve it over time. It’s

the worst it’s ever going to be right now and you just keep improving it. That was bounce

rate.

Time on site. I think the average on a lot of our sites over the board is around one to two

minutes. That is something that we do try and increase by doing small tweaks. It’s not so

much that we’re trying to identify, yes, changing that increased the time on the page. It’s

all the factors and it’s very hard for us to isolate because I’m changing so much at once. I

probably need to get better at testing as well. Testing is one of those things, John Reese

talked about it, testing, testing is just something that small tweaks can have big impact.

Dave’s hot tip

Dave’s hot tip. You can head over to eBay if

you’re still struggling for keyword research,

head over to eBay, have a look at some of

the categories. Look for the top level

categories and you can drill down. The way

eBay works is they’ll give you the top

categories. eBay are testing fanatics. eBay,

Amazon and Zappos , these big guys have huge budgets, so if you model what it is that

they do, if you’re looking for keywords, head over to eBay, look at some of the big

categories, keep drilling down and you’ll find out a lot of the second tier type keywords.

The other thing as well, is something I don’t do enough of, mainly because I’ve had such a

good experience with the SEO things, is testing first with pay per click. I know quite a lot of

my friends, that is where they start. Before they get into SEO, they’ll run some pay per click

campaigns, run some AdWords ads, run some Yahoo! ads, put some tracking to know what

keywords are converting.


Once they say, yes, this is a money phrase, then they start to optimize for that. At the

moment I’m just throwing as much against the wall as I can and I’ll see what sticks. Their

strategy probably sounds a little bit better and that is something that we will be moving

towards, especially for our clients, because we want to get as quick wins as possible.

When we work with clients, we want to make sure that we optimize for as much as

possible. Pretty much you want to do your on page optimization for every page on your

website. That way you install your Analytics, on page optimize everything, do some basic

link building, then come back and see where those easy wins are. Once you know where

the easy wins are, then you can be a lot more focused on targeting what keywords you’re

going to go after and really start to hone in on driving that traffic. I talked briefly before

about the idea for local businesses, small amount of traffic can equal big dollars. I see there

is a big opportunity here for doing SEO for local business.

80/20 rule

The final thing is the 80:20. I’m just making

sure you’re focusing on the 20% that is

going to give you the 80% of the results.

Make sure that you create your keyword

plan. You’ve got that in your workbook, so

when you’ve got a moment, just plan it out.

Target your buying phrases. Try and find

that balance between going for high competition type keywords with lots of searches and

also the keywords that are going to convert into sales as well. Installing Google Analytics

and retargeting based on your results.

That retargeting based on your results was that idea that I was talking about. We do a lot

of analysis on Planet 13 and then feeding the data back into itself and then also looking at

Google Analytics. That wraps up Keyword Research. We might finish this with some

questions.

Question: If you’re dealing with a local business that already has a brand, already has a website, let’s say Joe’s Plumbing. He wishes to increase his capture and let’s say he’s based in Preston. Would you create a new site called Preston Plumbing and somehow

feed it? How would that fit with his existing site? If you’re going for a suburb type name, let’s say he covers surrounding suburbs as well, how would you cover this

kind of situation in terms of the URL?


Answer: The first thing that I would do, I would identify their business, where they’re

located and make sure that I get the key suburbs around that particular area, the real key

ones. I would do the on page optimization for those. So five or six suburbs around where

they are and I’d do the on page optimization on their site for those keywords. Usually there

would be variations like South Yarra Dentists and then it might be something like

Periodontist Windsor just so that way those geographic keywords are on the site.

Because we’re talking about really long tail things you can pick up those keywords even

though you might have the geographic location on one page and dentist on another page,

it’s still in there because it is telling Google, hey, this site is about that location. Basically I’ll

pick out five or six suburbs, I’ll optimize pages on their site for that and then if there are

really key ones like Melbourne Dentist or South Yarra Dentist, some of the real money

phrases, then I will register a domain name. A lot of it does depend on what the client has

asked for as well. It’s obviously going to be more expensive for them for us to then go

build a WordPress blog and build up a feeder site network that feeds back to that website,

so it really does depend on the client.

Question: If the URL is so important in this, would you take, let’s take my plumbing example, Joe’s Plumbing/Preston, /Thornbury as extensions of their existing URL as well as

optimizing on the page with those phrases, those suburb names?

Answer: So you’re talking about trying to put in sub categories in the website with the

geographic location and then having pages? It’s a good standard practice to try and have

the keyword in the URL, which I talked about. So if you can have the geographic location in

there as well, then more power to you.

From a management point of view, having these different sub categories, for me we’re

getting down to the point of splitting hairs and it’s probably focusing so much on the

details. As long as you get your on page optimization right, you have whatever your

primary keyword is, that you’re trying to optimize that particular page for, if you have that

in the URL, then you should be alright. You don’t need to stuff too much in there. But it

can’t hurt either. I think having those suburbs, if it’s easy enough, then implement it, but

it’s probably the 80 % there that’s not going to give you the result there.

Question: I’ve got a quick extension to that question as well just because it happens so often for us in regards to the domain being the actual brand itself. BHP.com is

probably a good example but you touched on it before, whether you would create feeder sites for that. Are there other less intensive ways of capturing that audience? We’ve got the example at the moment gabblehouse.com. They sell thoroughbred

horses. If they were to create thoroughbredsforsale.com or something like that as a domain, is that any improvement? This might be a splitting hairs type question.


Answer: Yes, you talked about a few things there. Are you talking about registering a

domain name and then having it automatically redirect?

Question: Yes, basically, or whether that has any improvement at all or whether it has to be a feeder site?

Answer: Are you building that feeder site for SEO benefit or because people are typing that

one phrase in?

Question: It would be more for SEO benefit.

Answer: If it’s for SEO benefit, then I would build a complete site on it because if you had a

WordPress blog you can build tons of pages. SEO is a game of numbers. If it was for SEO,

the more pages the better. Just make sure you come back to that thing we talked about in

the first session, which is knowing what your outcome is. Make sure those feeder sites are

optimized for what your outcome is. If you want to send them over there, then it needs to

be blatantly obvious when someone hits that page that they need to head over to

wherever you’re sending them.

Question: This is a question, I’m looking at doing more with Amazon on an affiliate basis using WordPress as a platform for building the websites. I’m just wondering what your

thoughts would be on going for a mega shopping site approach, or breaking it right out into very specific categories by the nature of the product itself.

Answer: I think it depends on what your long term vision is. If you’re selling as an Amazon

affiliate, then I’d break it down into sub sections. If you wanted to become Amazon, then

I’d go for the whole lot. But if you’re going for these sub sections and you’re building these

little mini portal sites, I think you’d be better off breaking it down into a sub set of that

category. So you might visit Amazon and say electronics, DVD cameras and maybe you

make a site about DVD cameras. Or you could even go one step further, it might be Sony

DVD cameras and then you’ve got all the models underneath and make it more of a portal

around that.

I don’t want to say no, don’t do that if you’ve got hopes of becoming the next Amazon and

building and competing against them. If you’re going to do that, then put it all under one

roof. But from a quick wins point of view, you’re going to be better off making it a little sub

sector.

Question: My question is about Google Maps. From a business perspective if I had a choice between being page 1 for SEO SERPS or page 1 Google Maps, which would you prefer?


Answer: I’d go Google Maps. From a local business point of view, everything is shifting

local. When we talk about, I’ve got a section on web 2.0. The way the web is shifting, things

like foursquare, which is a little app on your phone, things like that are starting to pop up.

The way they’re going to change, Google Maps are going to start to introduce little logos

and icons when you actually visit the web page. If you’re looking at Google Maps you’ll be

able to move your mouse over and it’ll have a little ad appear. That’s the way things are

going. I’d go for trying to get the local business listed on Google Maps.

The only thing is that algorithm is so new, things are just bouncing around at the moment.

It’s hard to know. You want to try and get the keyword in the title when you do register it.

But there are a few things we can do, and maybe we can have a little bit of a chat after the

break or during the break about local search. We might leave it there and have a quick

break of five or ten minutes.

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