Any effective SEO campaign starts with keyword analysis. Before we can decide where to target our SEO efforts we first need to understand what keywords we are going to be getting to Google page 1. Our keyword research revolves around niche analysis. This post explains some of the things we look at when performing keyword niche analysis.
When you start an SEO campagin with us we will first discuss with you the kind of keywords that you think your customers will be searching on. Your own business or local knowledge is invaluable in getting the best possible starting set of keywords. We will then take your keywords (perhaps 5 - 10) and expand them out, often to 20, 30 or more keywords. We expand them using a range of variants, such as local terms, value terms (e.g. luxury, low cost, sale) and more.
Once we have a list of keyphrases to analyse we run them through our keyword niche analysis software. This software analyses the keywords and pulls back several useful measures including:
This information allows us to recommend valuable keywords where a page 1 rank on Google is likely to be achievable.
A valuable keyword is first and foremost one with a high search volume. There is no point in getting to page 1 for a keyword that very few people search on. The PPC cost also indicates the value of the keyword as the more advertisers are prepared to pay for a keyword the more they value it, and therefore the more valuable traffic it is likely to provide.
The competitiveness of a keyword is a lot harder to estimate. The main way we determine this is to look at the current top 10 sites for that keyword and use a number of mertics on those sites to determine how easy or hard they will be to beat in the rankings. This kind of competitor site analysis can be quite complicated, starting from a number of standard measures such as the Moz Domain Authority (DA) ranking, Google's own Page Rank (PR) and moving on to keyword frequency analysis and back link analysis.
The end result of all this analysis allows us to recommend a handful of keywords that we can optimise. These keywords should be those that we have a reasonably high chance of getting onto page 1, and that will produce a significant amount of valuable traffic. The PPC cost applied to the monthly search volume even allows us to quantify the value of a page 1 ranking, and give a quantitative comparison of our SEO cost to the value generated.
Once our SEO campaigns have started we reperfom this analysis on a wide range of keywords on a daily basis. This covers not just the primary keywords for the campaign, but a large number of related keywords that should also show improvement. You can login to your own SEO dashboard to review this on a daily basis. This reporting allows you to see the progress of your campaign, and the results that are being delivered, whever you want to.
If you'd like a free, no-obligation keyword and competitor analysis please get in touch on 01509 852 188 .
