Tools of the Trade
Training Products
Personal Consulting
Listen to the Podcast
Free NewsletterThis week, I’m going to launch into a three part series on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) including the secrets that helped my web sites to reach 1 million unique visitors per year. What does this have to do with building a business? Simply everything – the techniques I’m going to teach you are worth their weight in gold. A few weeks ago I posted a video on how google works where I briefly explained the importance of SEO for building your web site’s authority, and several of you asked for more.
This is an extensive, in-depth series – well over 5,000 words. In this part, I’m going to focus on keyword research, in part 2 we’re going to talk about on-page SEO to build relevance for your website, and finally in part 3 I’m going to talk about off-page SEO including building backlinks and getting your web site indexed and ranked well on the search engines.
Why Search Engine Optimization Matters
If you missed the video on how google works, you might want to take a quick look at it. The big three search engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo) are the master index of the internet. People don’t look at the yellow pages or even the encyclopedia anymore – they google search terms. Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is simply a process you can use to improve the visibility of your website to the big search engines – so people can find your web site.
The huge advantage of traffic from search engines is that you don’t have to pay for it. Unlike sponsored ads, traffic that comes from the search engines is completely free. The higher you rank in google and other engines for terms related to your niche, the more traffic you will get. Other forms of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) involve using paid listings and ads such as adwords – but you can actually build a successful site without any paid ads using natural traffic from search engines.
How much traffic can you get from search engines? For my mature web sites, I receive about 56% of my traffic from search engines – including the majority of new visitors. About another 30% of my traffic comes from referring sites including social media sites and other web sites in my niche, and the remaining 10% is direct traffic to people who already know about or have bookmarked my site.
The above figures are for a mature site that attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors a year, but has almost no paid advertising. If you are starting with a brand new site, you may not get any search engine traffic initially, but if you follow the methods outlined in this series, you will see search engines index you and start to send traffic after a few months. Consistency and persistence will pay off.
Keep in mind that search engine optimization is not the only way of getting traffic – you can also use social media sites, networking, guest blogging, word of mouth, traditional advertising and online advertising to attract visitors. However SEO is a arguably the largest free source of new visitors, as most information and purchase decisions now start with a simple web search.
How Search Engines Work – On Page and Off Page Factors
As I explained in my video, Google and the other search engines use a program called a “bot” that visits your web site every few days. The bot tries to evaluate the relevance and authority of your web site relative to others on the web. Relevance refers to what your page and website are about – so for example if your web site is about fly fishing, google will see a lot of keywords and terms related to fly fishing and index your site accordingly. Authority refers to how important your web site is relative to all of the other “fly fishing” web sites on the web (5.87 million in a quick search I did).
Google actually uses over 200 factors and an unpublished formula to decide how relevant your site is to various search terms and how much authority your site has. However, we know that relevance is determined primarily by “on page” factors that you have control over, and authority is determined primarily by “off page” factors such as the number of sites linking to yours (called backlinks). Off page factors are not all within your control, but on-page factors are. This week we’re going to focus on the doing the keyword research that forms a foundation for both.
Keyword Research
Before you can make your web site attractive to the major search engines, you need to know which keywords are important in your niche. This is the key to becoming relevant.
People type certain combinations of words, called keywords, into the google search box a lot more than others. For example, the phrase “fishing knots” generates twice the daily traffic that “fishing rods” does. So if you want to score well with the search engines for a particular phrase or niche, you should have a list of the relevant keywords for your niche handy and target the most popular ones often.
If you want to be even smarter, you should target longer phrases that have moderate traffic but low competition. We also call this “the long tail” which (using the graph above) refers to the fact that up to 80% of the search traffic actually comes not from the top keywords in a niche, but the less searched for ones – which we call the long tail of the graph. Often if you target one long tail phrase, you will also pick up traffic from related long tail key phrases.
How do you find these keywords? The Google free keyword tool will give you a great place to start by showing daily traffic and relative competition. I use a professional tool called Market Samurai, which really helps me zero in on lower competition but profitable keywords in my niche. Full disclosure here – the Market Samurai link is an affiliate link that will provide a commission to me if you decide to order from that link. Its also a tool I paid full price for and use on a daily basis.
Start by doing keyword research for your main web site. Find our which keywords are most popular in your niche and keep a list of them handy so you can use them as you are building content for your site. Next, do additional keyword research around major topics you might want to cover in your site for articles or specific products.
An important tip: Before you finalize an article or page for your web site, do quick keyword research on the title – you may find that the title you have picked is not one people are actually searching for. Just reordering the keywords a bit in your title may significantly enhance the impact of your page.
How to Do Keyword Research
Whether you are using the Google free keyword tool, or Market Samurai, you start by typing in a few keywords related to your topic or niche. The keyword tools will first display a list of related keywords, and then show you how much search engine traffic there is daily for that keyword and also the relative competition.
Many beginners looking at the google free tool try to target keywords that have the most traffic. This is almost always a mistake since these keywords are also highly competitive. In fact for top keywords you are often competing against established web sites run by teams of professionals who can not only generate more content than you but also have already established substantial authority on the web.
Its the web equivalent of an 80lb kid entering the ring with a 200lb heavyweight boxer – its not a fair fight!
Finding Keywords You Can Target
What you actually want to do, particularly in the initial stages, is target very low competition keywords where you might have a chance of making some progress. These so called “long tail” keywords are not easy to find. Often you need to start with a top level set of keywords and key phrases and then do further research on each of those to narrow it down to a set of low competition keywords that have moderate daily traffic. These are the ones you will target.
The advantage of using a professional tool like Market Samurai is that it it provides much more detailed statistics on the daily traffic, specific competition numbers for each keyword, even keyword dollar value, and can help automate the process of finding viable low competition keywords to target. In fact you can filter out highly competitive keywords, and also filter out keywords that are either unprofitable or have a poor match for your business niche.
It also has a competition module that will show you how strong each of the top 10 listings in google are for a given keyword, and even show you what their backlink network looks like. This lets you “scope out the competition” in detail before you jump into a niche that may already be too crowded, since the top 10 pages for a keyword get most of the traffic from google.
What’s Next?
After you’ve got a solid list of both the top keywords in your niche and also some longer tail keywords that are low competition you can start the actual process of optimizing your web site. Next week in part 2, I’m going to focus on the most important on-page factors for increasing the ranking of your web site. We’ll make extensive use of your keywords to make sure your site is highly relevant to your business niche. In part 3, we’ll talk about building site authority and the importance of backlinks.
Thank you for visiting Online Business Zen – and don’t hesitate to subscribe for regular updates on how you can build your own successful online business.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I really like Market Samurai, too! I was an early adopter. Google’s free tool has gotten better, but I think I get better results with MS. Also, you can get a great matrix of the top ten sites for various keyword phrases. That’s become really helpful. Thanks for the great article.
Lee – I agree Market Samurai is fantastic if you are researching keywords or looking for a new niche. I use my copy at least once a day to look at new niches, track my progress with my sites, and look for new opportunities. I’m going to shoot some video of it in the coming weeks to post on the blog as well. Thanks for your comment!