There are 6 basic steps to successful seo.
1 Market Research
2 Website Construction
3 On Page Optimisation
4 Content Creation
5 Building Back Links
6 Tracking Results
Lets look at the first one of these processes in a bit more detail today.
Market Or Keyword Research
Market research determines the keywords your website can target. This is done by finding keywords with good monthly search volumes, and then checking the competition of these keywords to make sure your website will be able to compete in this market. That is determined by 3 things. Your budget, time constraints and keyword commerciality.
Keywords with ultra high monthly search volumes will have stiff competition. It will consume a lot of resources in both time, manpower, and budget to succeed in this market. If you are a major insurance company this won’t be a problem, but if you are a small business or sole trader then this keyword will not be successful for your seo campaign unless you happen to have a large scale budget.
The keyword commerciality can only be determined beforehand by running an adwords campaign. Typically a major company will run a £2500 adwords campaign on a new keyword and determine if the visitors took the required action- i.e. making a purchase on the landing page.
If there isn’t enough revenue made from this in terms of how much money it would take to organically list this keyword in the no.1 spot in Google, then this could be deemed a bad commercial keyword, or it could also mean the website copy is poor.
But here is the quandary- for a new website it may not be developed fully to test this approach out. If there is an existing website and low sales occur after an adwords campaign, it could mean the conversion aspect of your site is low, the sales or web copy is bad, and not necessarily that the keyword has a low commercial value.
We generally have to make some assumptions about certain keywords once we find the appropriate ones with good monthly search volumes. Say for example you sold a brand name product called a “Smiths Shape Garden Multi Tool”, for £87, and the Google keywords tool showed us that “1800″ people were searching for this term a month using the exact phrase (exact match), then we’d have to assume this would be a highly profitable keyword if it was going to take £5000 to achieve the no 1 spot over 6 months.
If the no. 1 listed website gets around 42% of the clicks then there would be roughly 756 people a month looking to buy or find more info on this product. If you converted 1% of these you would shift £65, 772 worth of product per month. If you managed to raise your conversion by a simple 1% you double your takings to a whopping £131,544 per month. Still think seo isn’t cost effective?
Find the traffic- deliver the traffic-tweak the conversion- work out the margins- retweek conversions- raise profits-find new keywords- repeat cycle.
A wise company will perform keyword research on a regular basis even on an established website, to uncover new keywords to target and drive in new sales and customers. New keywords or rising keyword trends can even be uncovered by analyzing the Google analytics or other preferred web traffic stats.
That’s it for part 1 of 6. Tune in tomorrow for part 2.
