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Foundational SEO: Branching Out With Best Practices Keyword Research
April 24, 2008
In a recent interview with Top SEOs , I was asked a question about the continuously changing SEO environment.
I replied, "I believe there are some foundational things about Search Engine Optimization that have not changed much over the last 10 years. Staying true to some of these core, foundational concepts of best practices SEO has played a significant role in the success of Intrapromote."
I encountered a very good example of this while reviewing one of our client campaigns.
We have an ecommerce client with a robust store offering a little over 500 products. With a list of specific product names in hand, I tasked our keyword research experts to dig deep into keyword research to see how people are currently searching for all 500 of their products.
When I say "dig deeper", I often use the word picture with clients of keyword research being like a large tree. Comprehensive keyword research starts at the base of the tree with broad keywords, then considers every single major branch of the tree and (here's the comprehensive part) every single large, medium and small branch connected to these major branches.
Our specific search behavior questions in this case:
1. Are search engine users searching for variations of these product names?
2. If so, what are these variations and what is the potential of driving additional traffic to the client's site by targeting these variations?
The end result of our comprehensive keyword research? Going down every major and minor tree branch revealed exactly 224 variations of the 500 product names being used at search engines. We estimate that these 224 variations account for over 2,000 user searches every single day at search engines. Since traffic is what we're after, each of these variations have now become new targets for our SEO, Link Building, and Social Media Marketing efforts for this client.
So, done correctly and regularly, comprehensive keyword research is a great example of a foundational SEO activity that has not changed very much. We even found that for one major brand utilizing various cartridge add-ons, search engine users don't search for "[product name] cartridges", they search for "[product name] software". Good to know that inquiring Googlers may be headed to a competitors site if our client's site is not optimized and performing well for variations of this product name along with "software".
Bottom line reminders:
1. A cardinal sin of keyword research is to not look for every possible variation of your product names.
2. Never, ever assume how people search for your products or services.
All posts by Doug Ausbury
posted by Doug Ausbury at April 24, 2008 11:17 AM
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Comments
thanks..
Posted by: kelebek at April 26, 2009 04:44 AM