How-To
Keyword Research and Expansion for Search Marketing
How in-depth keyword research can benefit your site's visbility by Dave Pasternack
Feb 06, 2004
Direct marketers tend to manage search marketing campaigns in paid placement environments, like Overture and Google, based on ROI metrics such as an “allowable” cost of customer acquisition, or ROAS. In order to keep campaigns efficient in the ever-competitive paid placement auction marketplaces, savvy marketers are constantly expanding their keyword lists and testing new keyword listings to find those high ROI opportunities that the competition has missed.
Your choice of keywords is critical to the success of your campaign because those keywords are the primary elements that bring motivated traffic to your site. Internet users who type keywords into a search engine query box are acting on a need for information (or a product or service), so careful selection of the right keywords can attract the kind of traffic that results in good conversion rates. The key to keyword listing expansion is establishing a regular process that uses the various resources at your disposal to make educated guesses as to which keywords will meet your ROI goals.
People are starting to use the power of search to target their requests more specifically. Currently, approximately 40% of all search queries are three terms or longer. So what does this mean to us as search engine marketers? And how do we capitalize on it?
Make sure you use keyword phrases, not just keywords. Successful searches, the ones that bring traffic that turns into immediate orders or other valuable actions, are most frequently from multiple keywords and phrases. Unless you don't mind high acquisition costs, you should probably eliminate the high priced "single" keywords and any highly competitive phrase (e.g., "Internet marketing"). You should also start with the longest keyword list possible. If you use a campaign management system to manage your SEM campaign, it will automatically lower and eventually remove any keyword listings that are not converting. After that, you can examine the reports of word phrases that didn't convert and possibly recombine them to come up with the right phrases. The engines themselves have no charge for adding words, which should encourage you to expand and experiment. You shouldn't put yourself in a situation where you have any disincentive for keyword expansion.
One of the best ways to expand your keyword list is by talking to people in your business or industry. You'd be surprised at the variety of words they come up with. Have the top brass of a company get together and brainstorm as many words and phrases as possible to describe what they do. Once you have a list, try to combine the words and phrases in meaningful ways. You should also talk to your customers, and examine your own website's log files to see the actual search phrases visitors are using to find you. When a visitor is referred to your page from a search engine or directory, he or she leaves a trace that reveals what keywords and key phrases he or she used to search for your site.
Also examine your competitors' meta tags. What words and phrases are your competitors using to describe their products and/or services? You might even want to check out their source code and see what words and phrases have been inserted into their keywords meta tag. Don't plagiarize, but taking note of their keywords may inspire you to think of expansion areas you might have overlooked. Don't bother using your company name as a keyword or phrase. Unless you have a well-known brand name, it's not going to be searched for. Using location names, such as the name of your city, allows you to narrow and define your keyphrases. This will reduce competition for your keywords, and the traffic you get as a result will have a higher conversion rate since the traffic has gone through an additional level of pre-qualification.
It’s a good idea to use keyword suggestion tools to augment the initial list with popular, related terms. The first one you should try is the Overture suggestion tool. You simply type in one of your candidate keywords or phrases, click, and you’re immediately presented with a list of the most popular actual search terms related to your input, with stats for the past month, as measured by the Overture engine. Google has a tool as well, and there is a commercial, paid tool called Wordtracker. Did-it.com also allows free, unlimited use of their keyword generation tool.
Be aware that while phrases are the key to keyword expansion, many of the PPC engines have minimum click-thru thresholds that must be met for a keyword listing to be approved, so you have to make sure your keyword selections can meet that minimum. If you’re targeting one- and two-term searchers, your search engine marketing strategy should focus heavily on the PPC engines. If, however, a large portion of your market consists of people who are moving beyond one- and two-term searches - and in particular if you have a large website - then you should probably supplement your PPC campaign with XML paid inclusion.
Just some final hints: the level of targeting on one-word searches is usually lower and costs are often higher, resulting in a low ROI. The trick is to find phrases that are popular but that don't have a lot of competition. That's the essence of good keyword expansion. Marketers often start out by picking the most obvious and general 20 or 40 keywords related to their businesses for use in their search engine campaigns. Often, fierce competition ensues for these few terms, driving up prices in auction marketplaces. These high-volume keywords become the core of the campaign, and while they do deliver volume, they’re not very efficient. Take the opportunity to do some keyword expansion and find those high ROI keywords you have been missing.