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Researching Great Keyphrases To Help Drive Traffic

To kick off this WordPress SEO guide, I’m going to start by focusing on keyword research and how you can go about identifying the keyword phrases you need to target in your SEO campaign. Keyword research is a huge topic – in this post I cover the main concepts that you need to be aware of and provide pointers to some great tools that can help you with your SEO efforts. I focus mainly on optimizing your site for Google (given its dominance), but most of what I discuss also applies to the other major search engines out there (Yahoo, Bing, and Ask.com).

What Is The Primary Goal of SEO?

It’s important to clarify this before we get started, although I think it’s fairly obvious! The main goal in optimizing your site for the search engines is to drive more traffic to your site. These new visitors will then hopefully consume your content, buy your products/services, sign up for your email newsletter, or do whatever it is you want them to do. Ideally, you’ll do this by optimizing your site for several keyword phrases that all rank number one in the search results. However, you don’t want to receive just any traffic – the goal is to send well-targeted traffic to your site to increase the chances that your site’s offerings are relevant and interesting to your new visitors. There’s no point in receiving lots of daily visits just for the sake of it – you want people who are interested in what you have to say/sell.

Why is Keyword Research So Important?

Keyword research is absolutely vital in your quest for search engine dominance – if conducted properly, it enables you to locate keyword phrases that receive healthy amounts of daily traffic where the competition for that keyword phrase (i.e. the top ten sites listed on Google for that phrase) is beatable. Without conducting this initial research it’s likely that you’ll waste lots of valuable time focusing on phrases that you’ll have no chance of ever ranking for, or conversely you’ll end up ranking number one in Google for several keyword phrases that receive little or no daily traffic. The initial investment of time and effort that is required for keyword research really is worth it in the long-run and the potential benefits can be massive.

What Makes A “Good” Keyword Phrase?

So, before being able to find great keywords that you can target, you need to know what the criteria are for a good phase. There are several factors to take into consideration, but essentially you want phrases that receive a good amount of daily traffic where there are relatively few competitors. To be more specific, I often target phrases that receive a minimum of 80-100 daily searches and have less than 100,000 competing pages.

By focusing on this level of competition you have more chance of ranking well – obviously if your phrase has 20,000,000 competing pages then you have no real hope in ranking for that phrase in the short-term. You can certainly focus on phrases with more than 100,000 sites/pages, but just be aware that it will likely take a lot more work, time, and effort to get a good ranking. What you’re ideally after in the short-term are those nice little phrases that have a good number of daily searches, with relatively weak competition.

Another important factor in choosing which keyword phrases you target is the quality of the competition that you’re up against. I’ve already mentioned that the number of competitors is important, but probably more important is the quality of those competitors. For instance, you might find what seems to be a great keyword phrase – it has a high number of daily searches and it has relatively few competitors – but if you take a closer look on the first page of Google for that keyword phrase, you might find a different story. If those sites are all authority sites – that is, sites such as the BBC, CNN, Wikipedia, etc – you’ll probably have very little chance of outranking them. In such cases you’re probably better off focusing on other keyword phrases where the quality of competition is lower.

Phrases with less competition tend to have “long-tails” – that is, they have three or more keywords in them. For example, long-tail searches related to digital radios might include, “sony digital radio”, “black sony digital radio”, and “Sony CMT-HX90BTR Digital Micro System”. These phrases are advantageous in that they have less competing pages, but also because they are much more specific than broader phrases (e.g. “radio”, “digital radio”). Therefore, if your site is optimized for long-tail phrases, and a user finds your site through such a phrase, there is the increased likelihood that the content they find will of interest to them.

Also, when it comes to products and services, users searching via long-tail phrases tend to be closer to the point of sale – someone searching for the “Sony CMT-HX90BTR Digital Micro System” is much more likely to buy something than someone searching for “digital radios” (who is probably in a more exploratory/research mindset).

Utilizing Keyword Research Tools

Now that we know what makes a good keyword phrase, how exactly do we go about finding them? This is where a variety of useful tools come in handy – these tools can help you collect lots of data related to keyword phrases – in particular the types of metrics that we’re interested in (i.e. the number of daily searches, number and quality of competition). There are three tools that I use on a regular basis:

Market Samurai

This really is a fantastic tool that will save you so much time! Yes you have to pay for it, but if you’re serious about doing keyword research and optimizing your sites for the search engines it’s well worth the investment. It comes with lots of different functions and provides you with comprehensive data about the keywords you’re interested in – in particular, when you enter a keyword, it will generate lots of other related phrases and show you the traffic those phrases receive on a daily basis, the amount of competing pages, and the quality of the competition. You can easily filter your results – so, for example, you may want to set your filters to only show phrases that receive a minimum of 80-100 searches a day and have less than 100,000 competing pages.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

If funds are a little short, or you’d prefer not to pay for SEO software, you’ll want to use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. This is a free tool offered by Google that you can use to check the approximate traffic that certain keyphrases get on a daily/monthly basis. Again, it will generate lots of related keyword phrases when you perform a search and will show you how many searches are made using those phrases. It’s very simple to use and something that I use on almost a daily basis (in addition to Market Samurai) – it’s ideal for when you’re writing a new post or article and want to quickly find a couple of phrases to incorporate into your content.

Google Insights

Another great free tool offered by Google that I use on a regular basis is Google Insights. This offers a range of useful information about the keyword phrases you’re interested in – for example, it will show you the interest in that keyword phrase over a number of years, months, and days, and will plot the results in a graph. You can do this for multiple keyword phrases and have them all added to a single graph to get a useful visual comparison of different phrases. It also breaks down the searches made using your keywords into regional areas starting with countries, but you can dig deeper and see the interest in different towns and cities for each country (potentially useful if you have a local business). Another great feature is that it tells you about “rising searches” – that is, the searches that are hot right now in that area. These are ones that can be good to target!

Wordtracker

Wordtracker is another tool that many people use – I don’t have much experience of using it myself (mainly because Market Samurai is so comprehensive), but it is a popular tool that many people use on a regular basis.

Take Action

When starting out, you probably want to target 10-20 different keyword phrases that meet your criteria for a good phrase. You may find that some of your keywords already appear in your site’s content – if so, great – if not, you need to consider which new articles you can write so that your site has a chance to rank for these keyword phrases. I’d recommend only using 2-3 related keywords for each post/page you write – anymore than this and it can be deemed as spam and it can stand out a mile to someone reading your content. Always remember that you’re primarily writing for people – not search engines! In addition to adding your keywords to your site’s content, it’s also important to use them in other places – for instance, when possible you’ll want to use them in your title and meta description tags, headings, alternative images for text, and when linking to other pages on your site (this last point is particularly important and will be covered in detail in part three of the guide).

Conclusion

Whilst it’s essential that you’re aware of the keyword phrases you’re going to target, and that you try and incorporate them into your site’s content, you’re very unlikely to rank on the first page of Google for these phrases unless you can get some backlinks to your site! This is absolutely crucial and in the next part of this guide I’m going to focus on the importance of backlinks and how you can go about obtaining high-authority links that will help you rank better for the keywords you’re targeting.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction and Guide Overview
2. Researching Great Keywords To Help Drive Traffic
3. 10 Ways You Can Generate Quality Backlinks To Boost Your WordPress SEO
4. Ten Quick Power Tips To Drive More Visitors To Your WordPress Site
5. WordPress SEO Issues – Managing Duplicate Content Effectively
6. Top 8 Free WordPress SEO Plugins
7. 8 Tips For Promoting Your WordPress Site
8. Great Tools For Analyzing The Impact Of Your WordPress SEO