How to do Keyword Research - Part 1: Conversion

Everyone  has their own to approach Keyword Research and i thought i would offer my own.

Keyword Research is arguably the most basic skill a Search Marketer must posses. Clear, well thought out Keyword research is usually conducted as part of building and maintaining a website’s Keyword Footprint by highlighting the keywords and phrases that could be used as the basis of a content creation plan.

Firstly its a good idea to be clear as to your over all objectives. Why are you conducting the keyword research? Is your website generating the bulk of its revenue through Ad placements and therefore are you interested in building absolute traffic numbers? Or does your website provide a premium service, goods, or leads to a ecommerce site? If so you’ll likely be more interested in finding those keywords that convert…

PART 1: Keyword Research for Conversion

Keyword Research for conversion is all about finding the keywords that your potential customers are typing into their search engines. Finding the keywords or phrases that convert at the highest rates can be tricky as many factors can persuade or put off a potential customer. It is therefore important to appreciate how those on-page variables will affect how your users will interact with your website. Clear “Calls to action”, page design and usability especially on entry (landing) pages all play their part.

Finding keywords that convert

1. Consult your Website analytics

Make sure your conversion points have been set up. Conversion points are those business goals you intended a user to complete. Usually:

Purchase or sign up

Lead - trail request/Request for information

Then create a segment of “converting users” (Visits to your site that went on to complete a conversion). Users of Google Analytics will find a “Visits with conversions” segment already set up!

All of those acquisition keywords listed within the the “Visits with Conversions” segment were used to find your site and then convert.

These keywords should be your starting point for optimising the content that already ranks for that particular keyword term.

Optimising the content may mean improvements to where the page ranks within the SERP’s (Search Engine Result Pages) or improvements to on-page variables (conversion optimisation) as discussed above.

To broaden the depth of converting keywords

2. Conduct PPC

Obviously your Analytics package will only display the converting keywords used to find your site if your site already ranks for that term.

Using PPC you can widen your over all keyword footprint in a relatively short time period.

Starting with the converting terms in your analytics package will allow you to build out search phrases and keywords using a keyword research tool such as Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery or Google Adwords keyword tool. Google Adwords is a completely free service and one that i find provides the most useful results.

Once your built up your themed ad groups be sure to write a concise, descriptive and persuasive ad that links to a highly relevant page on the site, in most cases this will not be the homepage.

Run the campaign for a minimum of 3 months, a longer time period will help to suppress biases found around holiday periods and other date specific events (Halloween, Valentines day, Mothers day etc).

A keyword to be used in future SEO content creation plans are those not* with the greatest CTR (Click through rate), Impressions or the lowest CPC (cost per click) but those that actually convert at the highest levels.

Conversion rates for PPC keywords can be found by again looking at the “Visits with conversion” segment and then filtering those keywords to those that came from “Paid Search”.

*Again be aware If you PPC campaigns drives a lot of non converting traffic to your site, it would be advisable to investigate how best these pages can be optimised to encourage a user to complete the desired goal before embarking upon content creation.

Build and Optimising your content

Once you have found the desired converting keywords you must then use them to begin to build a content creation and optimisation strategy.