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Why is nobody talking about this in detail? I would really like to learn about how you guys develop your keyword strategy (which should by definition be something to be repeated on all key pages frequently).
Grateful about some additional comments. If you got this very topic covered some place and I missed it, sorry, cheers, Jens
What do you expect?
If you've tried search before (at Google, for example) you might be able to ask more focused.
Many folks I know just grab their keywords out of the blue or use keywords they BELIEVE would click. But KNOWING how your keywords will perform is of material importance. Especially if you want to bring them into context of your immediate content and overall strategy, achieving maximum relevancy at the same time.
As keywords represent your products and drive traffic you should apply marketing techniques like a comparison of demand, supply and value of your keywords as we know it from the offline world.
Preferrably you want to have keywords in high demand with low supply and high value regarding your relavent content. I am using a combination of Overture, Alta Vista and Google to make the equation and bring the comparison into context to the target topic.
I was wondering what techniques are applied at different levels and what you guys do to achieve maximum keyword efficiency.
I understand from my marketing experience that this process can be very dynamic and some generic tools can not mimic a human job here.
What's your take on this?
Many thanks and sorry again if my first line-up was not that clear.
Jens
Then observing rankings for my pages vs. competitors.
Analyzing logs for search terms used to find my site. As Brett said somewhere: "Its like letting the search engine TELL YOU what it wants to be fed for keywords."
I study which pages are visited first, how long people stay there, where they go then, if they convert.
Everything contributes in improving my site.
some generic tools can not mimic a human job here.
Yup.
How do you cope with the obvious lack of deep expertise of your customer's business environment, strategy, portfolio dynamics etc.?
Do customers ask you to rather transfer the mentioned techniques into their company for their editors to apply (as kind of like another marketing discipline adding to their existing offline marketing capabilities) as opposed to always outsource and maybe miss flexibility, dynamic if they would do this part themselves?
Cheers, Jens
lack of deep expertise of your customer's business
May help to understand how customers will search, because vendors and clients terminology may differ. But surely not easy in some special businesses you don't know nothing about. So I tend to focus on businesses I'm somewhat familiar with.
transfer the mentioned techniques into their company
I explain the basics so they're able to understand what I do - and why it's worth paying me ;)
But I don't give away all my knowledge.
BTW I was never asked to do that. My clients are happy that they don't have to dig in that stuff.
demand / supply
Say there's big demand for widgets (= high search frequency). And there's big supply for widgets. Define some ratio demand/supply.
Then I try to find more specific phrases with better ratios. Depends on products / services / informations you offer, certainly.
A version of this ratio may give extra weight to competitiveness according to number of SEOed sites.
Another important ratio includes conversion rates of phrases.
Would be kind of nice if others had something to add as well.
Jens
Here goes.
There's an awful lot of heavy lifting involved here. I mean why reinvent the wheel and do all that marketing research on keywords yourself when there are simple to use comprehensive services that make much of the effort you want to engage in superfluous?
Of course I am not scoffing at what has been suggested. I too search the major engines, review competitors pages, etc.
(Hey as a matter of fact you'd be suprised how many highly ranking pages don't have any keyword tags at all, particularly on Google.)
The research has been done and is being done and updated on a daily basis, and is readily available for incredibly modest prices. And I am not talking about Overtures search term suggestion tool, or even Ah-Ha's KeyWord Tool.
So all the marketing comparisons and metrics that you are thinking of messing around with could be, well a waste of time, regarding keywords that is. Actually not a waste of time, just sort of putting the cart before the horse, or applying inappropriate tools and over analysis to your efforts.
What you want are keywords that a lot of CUSTOMERS are searching on, and relatively few COMPANIES are bidding on. Now that's not to say that ad tracking, crm, demographic data collection etc isn't important.
You want to get an excellent core of good keywords that are relevant to your niche, so by golly take a deep breath and get yourself literally hundreds of targeted related niche keyphrases, which have a relatively little competition.
Then you can do all that other fancy stuff effectively.
Rob MacCurry
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[edited by: Woz at 1:48 am (utc) on July 30, 2003]
[edit reason] nu URLs please TOS#13 [/edit]
Adfree: you're not related to Rob, don't you?
But even if ... who cares ;)
