Doing Keyword Research The Smart Way

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.

www.theSEOmethod2.com

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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.


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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.


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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.


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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.


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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.


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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.


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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.


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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.


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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.


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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.


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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.


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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.


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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-secretsrevealed.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.


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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.


15

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.


16

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’ tshirts. 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?


17

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.


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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?


19

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.

20

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?


21

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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Doing Keyword Research The Smart Way

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