‘If you build it, they will come’. – Field of Dreams
The following tip was kindly provided by Matt Leonard, follow Matt on Twitter or watch his awesome contributions on SEJ!
It worked for Kevin Costner. He built it, they came. But, is turning cornfields into ballparks, on the off chance a long gone baseball team may show up, really the best way to go about things?
Probably not.
Yet, regarding SEO, that’s exactly what many people do. They start optimizing pages for specific keywords without really knowing if the impressions are even out there, if the keywords convert or if they’re even worthwhile. They use time, energy and resources without knowing what lies at the end of their optimized rainbow.
Now, I’m not trying to kill the entrepreneurial spirit here. Taking risks is how we succeed. But, in this case, you really don’t need to.
If you want to know the exact, correct keyword to target organically, use Paid Search and track the different keyword variations. You may find a singular version of the keyword outperforms the plural. You may find that it’s actually a phrased version of the keyword that performs best. You may also find that the advice from Word Tracker, or the Google Keyword Tool, was just plain wrong. Most importantly, you may have just saved yourself from a lost opportunity you’ll never even know was missing.
Any way you cut it, if you follow this tip, you will find the correct term to target in your SEO strategy. At that point, you can then head confidently down the road that leads to lots of free traffic. You may even run into the Chicago Black Sox on your way.
Do you know of more ways to make sure you pick the right keywords to target? Do you have experience with this tactic? Comment below and we just may use your tip in the future. You’ll get credit, of course.
If you found this tip helpful, you may also enjoy these: Test Your Keywords with PPC and Use Paid Search to Clean Up Your Meta Description. Also, huge thanks to our previous post commentor, Bartjan, who also suggested using PPC in many ways.
! install stats package that is NOT GA…
Request 10 keywords from the following people in a vaccum:
CEO or owner
marketing dir. or CMO
Sales Managers
Top Sales Person
Receptionist
3 or 4 current clients.
Also grab keywords from 5 competitors (client supplied)
take all and put them in spread sheet.
sort alpha
note duplicates of company employees and customers.
take 30 days stats to see which keywords are currently in use for website and which ones are not..
combine all lists. do searches…
target long tail for less competitive KW searches…
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Matt Leonard Reply:
June 3rd, 2009 at 3:51 pm
That’s an awesome methodology, to put it mildly.
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Excellent information Ann. Unfortunately, we often times rely on presumptions or lack of research and waste massive amounts of time and money. Jumping in to something without actually thinking in-depth about it is too risky
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Use PPC to inform SEO and SEO to inform PPC.
Heck, that’s rule #7 of our SEM Philosophy:
How to Achieve the Best Results for PPC & SEO
Cheers!
Ken
Ken Lyons’s last incredible blog post..Internal Link Building Kit
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see if your SEO is paying off here… http://www.thebitbot.com
Google Custom Search Engine
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We always use PPC to test keywords prior to optimizing… you would be crazy not to?
PPC makes it very easy to modify your landing pages for the best conversion also. I only start SEO on a keyword after success of a PPC campaign.
@ steveplunkett: Good, straight forward plan
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PPC combined with split testing is a really fast way of getting an ideal page very, very quickly.
Ian Macfarlane’s last incredible blog post..Google Toolbar PageRank update 27th May
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Yes, using adwords to see if people are even searching the keywords you are optimizing to is key. A huge time saver.
Also sometimes you get lucky and get a couple sales out of it. One thing we do to try to save money is to write a really crappy ad, with lots of misspellings and an enormous price. Usually that gets flagged by google within a couple days but in the mean time you can get some stats.
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Bartjan Reply:
June 8th, 2009 at 9:50 am
Don’t forget to turn off the content network
But you should keep your goal in mind. If you only want to know how many searches are made for a keyword a crappy CTR works. But if you also want to know if that keywords makes you any money (aka converts) it doesn’t make much sense.
Personally I prefer to target good converting keywords.
Bartjan’s last incredible blog post..Bing de nieuwe Google?
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Great advice Ann.
One thing most people don’t realize is you don’t have to spend lots of money to do this. You can just run with a first page min bid for a week to get a sample size and then you’ll have a relatively good idea about impressions.
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You are serving SEO nicely through this pretty post.
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PPC with split testing is good …..
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This was a really smart and simple tip you gave ANN. Even my client is using PPC and also doing SEO. But the keywords we got from search not all are converting well, even they showed lots of Searhes in Wordtracker and Google Adwords KW tool. So I feel using PPC really does open our eyes and helps us to concentrate our efforts on those keywords which will lead to sales.
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PPC seo tips… any other free technics
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Thank you Ann for a very useful tip.By using google adwords itself we can able to focus which keywords are prominently used by the users.I hope facebook and myspace can be really a good choice for the paid search.Again thanks for a wonderful tips and i will take it into my mind.
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