DEVELOP YOUR KEYWORD STRATEGY

THE RIGHT WAY TO

A publication of

InTERmEDIATE

SEO FROm THE

EXPERTS SERIES

BY RIcHARD BAXTER, SEO GADGET

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Introductory content is for marketers who are new to the subject. This content typically includes step-by-step instructions on how to get started with this aspect of inbound marketing and learn its fundamentals. After reading it, you will be able to execute basic marketing tactics related to the topic.

InTRODUcTORY

IS THIS EBOOK RIGHT FOR mE?

Not quite sure if this ebook is right for you? See the below description to determine if your level matches the content you are about to read.

Intermediate content is for marketers who are familiar with the subject but have only basic experience in executing strategies and tactics on the topic. This content typically covers the fundamentals and moves on to reveal more complex functions and examples. After reading it, you will feel comfortable leading projects with this aspect of inbound marketing.

InTERmEDIATE

Advanced content is for marketers who are, or want to be, experts on the subject. In it, we walk you through advanced features of this aspect of inbound marketing and help you develop complete mastery of the subject. After reading it, you will feel ready not only to execute strategies and tactics, but also to teach others how to be successful.

ADVAncED

THIS RESOURcE

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... brings your whole marketing world together in one, powerful, integrated sys-tem.

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Video Overview

Analyze your web traffic and see which sources are generating the most leads.

NBLOGGInG

Create blog content quickly while getting SEO tips and best practice pointers as you type.

MEmAIL

Send personalized,segmented emails based on any information in your contact database.

SEARcH OPTImIzATIOn

s Improve your rank in search engines by finding and tracking your most effective keywords.

ULEAD mAnAGEmEnT

Track leads with acomplete timeline-view of their interactions with your company

qSOcIAL mEDIA

Publish content to your social accounts, thennurture leads based on their social engagement.

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SEO FROm THE EXPERTS: THE RIGHT WAY TO DEVELOP A KEYWORD STRATEGY

Expert Advice By Richard Baxter

Richard is the CEO of SEOgagdet, a

U.S. and U.K. based inbound marketing

agency. When he’s not building new

SEO tools or helping search marketers

learn new skills, he loves driving fast

cars, listening to loud music and jet-

setting around the world speaking at

various digital marketing conferences.

FOLLOW mE On TWITTER@RIcHARDBAXTER

FOLLOW mE On TWITTER@DETEcTIVEDDUBS

Designed By Desmond Wong

Desmond is currently a creative

designer and inbound marketer at

HubSpot. He has worked with a variety

of start ups, medium, and large sized

companies over the years with a focus

in branding and business development.

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The buying process has changed.

The subject of user behaviour research, keyword research, or search

profiling is a relatively broad topic -- but an extremely interesting one. It’s

become possible, with a handful of free tools, to fetch data to tell us what

search terms people use in their day to day use of search engines.

Using free tools like Google’s Keyword Tool, it’s easy to learn how

many people are searching for a particular keyword. That data can be

translated into a site architecture that “catches all” of the potential search

terms you can think of, and in classic SEO, that’s where the journey

ends. It’s important, however, to fully understand your customer’s buyer

search behaviour.

Introduction

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The buying patterns of our target markets have changed. Imagine

search as a decision funnel, where organic search might present one or

two touch points with a customer in a journey or three or four. To make

a purchase decision, a customer might ask a friend and read a review

on their desired purchase before buying.

Understanding Buyer Search Behaviour in a Wider Context

Potential customers are finding your business in new and uniqe ways. The buyer decision process has changed as a result.

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Understanding how your customers use search engines to find your

products, services, blog posts, or any other content you may have

available to share is a critical component of your inbound marketing

efforts. Keyword research is such a powerful skill, and allows the search

marketer to size and prioritize their efforts, while keeping a keen eye on

the behaviour of their users.

In this chapter, we’ll look at the theory, and the practice, of discovering

keyword opportunities, organising them into meaningful campaign

categories, and translating those categories into decisions about your

site architecture.

If you have intermediate to advanced skills in Excel, you’ll find this

approach easy to absorb and assimilate into your existing keyword

research process. If you’re an Excel user, you might have come across

Niels Bosma’s SEO Tools for Excel and SEOgadget’s Adwords API

Extension for Excel.

Speaking the Right Language - Finding the Right Keywwords

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My process for keyword research falls into four simple steps:

In this ebook, we’ll look at methods to gather and group your keywords,

show you how to analyse the data, and use the outcome to better

structure your website.

Gathering Your Keywords

There are a variety of tools available to generate keyword ideas – some

provided by search engine companies themselves, others provided as a

service specifically for search marketers.

Our goal in the “keyword gathering” stage is to build a complete list. This

list should be built with the intention of benefiting your business, not

necessarily picking up on “hot” keyword. As many as 25% of all queries

Google processes daily have never been seen before! With a complete

list, you can take away a sense of certainty that you’re not missing out

on an important keyword opportunity.

Keyword Research in Four Simple Steps

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There are a number of different keyword sources – a great, and often

overlooked starting point is your own analytics. Try exporting the first

1,000 referring keywords from Google Organic search, and build a list in

Excel.

Gathering Your Keywords From Competitors

Both SearchMetrics and aHrefs have a similar competitive analysis

tool. Both provide keyword data for your own organic (and paid search)

activity, but also allow you to investigate your competitor’s ranking

keywords. This is useful if you need to understand their most important

keywords. HubSpot customers, you can simply use the HubSpot

Keywords and Competitive Intelligence tools to gain valuable insight.

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Free Tool: Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a tremendously powerful way to expand a keyword list.

By entering a “seed” keyword, the tool extracts related terms that would

appear in Google suggest. You can select web search, news search and

choose your geo location and language.

Tip: The more technically savvy marketers will notice that the “search results in html” URL can be scraped and exported into Excel very quickly.

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HubSpot’s Keyword Tool

Hubspot’s keyword tool is another great source for identifying relevant

keywords for your business. It shows you all the keywords your website

is ranking for and will add a bunch of additional metrics like how many

visits the keyword is generating, how difficult it is to rank for the keyword

and what is the total monthly search volume of the keyword. This allows

you to easily spot high volume keywords that you don’t currently rank

well for. You can use the difficulty metric to sort these from easiest first.

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Google Adwords API

For most of us, the Google Keyword tool is a powerful enough aid to

keyword research, fetching monthly average search volume and trends

data in your geo-location. The tool allows you to paste in up to 800

keywords at a time, making it a simple matter of recombining that data

into your spreadsheet at a later point.

For those lucky enough to have a Google Adwords API key, the

SEOgadget Adwords API Extension for Excel can fetch large amounts

of search volume data in a single API call. This drastically speeds up

the process of fetching search volume data and allows the researcher to

hurry along to categorising their keywords.

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Google Insights - Related Searches

Google Insights offers two features that I believe are immensely

powerful: “top searches” and “related terms.” Simply enter a keyword,

and Google Insights expands on that list for you. The data can be

exported and added to your list.

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Grouping Your Keywords Into Categories

When you’re designing your site navigation, you might want to consider

linking to pages with the highest likely search volume potential. Imagine

for a moment that you’re a website that sells used cars, and you

categorize by brand. Which of your brand pages should be linked to

from your homepage? Keyword categorisation answers precisely that

question.

A simple methodology to group your keywords together is to use Excel

filters:

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Create a custom filter, and then your data’s ready to go into a chart:

In our example above, “share price” would be a great top term to target,

so in site architecture terms, you’d want to consider creating a top level

category on your website called “share prices.” As you’re designing your

navigation, work down the keyword list in search volume order, picking

out the keywords you’ll need pages for.

While this guide was an extremely fast introduction to keyword

categorisation, and how to determine the types of pages you might want

to create and link to from your navigation, I hope you found it valuable.

For a full guide on the topic, take a look at this post over on SEOmoz.

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