rich mcpharlin

See Part 1

Now that we know about the different types of keywords we can start thinking about the keywords we want to target.

In general we usually start with a ‘seed’ keyword, one from which we will conduct our research.  This is likely to be a broad product or service name.

In our initial example we’re going to do our keyword research ‘old school’ – using the Google Keyword tool.

Lets get started, head over to the keyword tool and enter your seed keyword into the search box.  We’re going to use Lawnmowers as our seed keyword.

Google has returned in total 800 results for our keyword, some of them already look promising, others informational and time wasters.  Lets take the next step and order them by local search volume (in this case Australia).

We can instantly disqualify a few of these keywords as informational or ‘how to’.  Which Lawnmower and what lawnmower are both informational keywords, mostly likely looking for a comparison between multiple lawnmower types and brands.  These keywords are in the research phase of the conversion funnel and is unlikely to yield a potential sale and there for we will disqualify them from our further research.  Further there are a number of terms that are of a how to nature; mow lawn, mowing the lawn and mow the lawn can all be disqualified as well as they are looking for an instructional guide on lawn mowing.  These people likely already have a lawn mower and hence unlikely to purchase anything through our prospective webpage.

Note: If one is conducting SEO on behalf of a sizeable client who is a supplier of mowers, you could consider creating some content around the above topics in order to gain micro conversions (Facebook likes, newsletter signups) with an aim towards building a list and direct marketing in the future.

Looking deeper into the list you can see that there are a number of Ride On Mower type terms (all search volumes are broad match).  These are product type keywords, fairly deep in the purchasing cycle the prospect has already conducted research and decided they are interested in ride on mowers as opposed to a regular lawn mower.  Lets look a little deeper at these terms….