Lesson Three – Keyphrase Analysis 1

The first point to accept here is that this part of the process needs to be kept separate from other parts. Don’t be concerned at this stage where these keyphrases will go on your website – we’ll address this later. The important point is to find and record them. You’ll find the best way to do this is to open up a spreadsheet. Here’s a copy of one we use when doing this work with our clients….

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Don’t worry about all the columns at this stage, it’s the first two only you’ll be filling in at the moment – the phrase itself and the search volume (number of monthly searches). The other columns we’ll fill in later.

How do you go about finding keyphrases that will bring relevant traffic to your site? I’ll introduce you to a tool to take the guesswork out of it, courtesy of Google. The important thing about this is that this in an actual record of what real people have been searching for :-

https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal

You should go to this site and enter a phrase you think is important – you’ll see in the example below I’ve typed in ‘garden office’ (you’ll need to enter the access characters as well – once only though).

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At the top of the 5th column you’ll see the ‘match type’ option. You should set this to ‘exact’ (not ‘broad’). This is important because we looking to find the exact phrase people are typing in.

The two most important columns are the first, which is the exact phrase people are searching for, and the 4th column, the monthly number of searches. Its this information you should be transferring into your spreadsheet.

Clearly, the search volume is an important metric – the higher it is the more people will be arriving at your site if you capture this phrase. (You’ll also notice here that the singular and plural are different, and we need to make a note of both of them.). However its important also to capture some of the other variants, even if they have a small search volume they may have a high degree of relevance (also, they tend to be less competitive to get rankings for). So, in this case I would also make a note of ‘home garden office’, ‘garden office uk’ and ‘garden office buildings’. Possibly more but as a general rule of thumb not phrases which have a search volume of less than 100. (although it does depend on what sort of products/services you are selling of course).
So this is the process, think of keyphrases you think your potential customers may be searching for, check out the actual phrases which are being used using this tool, and transfer relevant phrases to your spreadsheet.

How many entries in your spreadsheet? At this stage say between 10 and 20 – although we may want to supplement with additional phrases later. (Actually we’ll revisit keyphrase analysis later particularly for ecommerce sites where there may be lots of products in a database)

The two major factors when identifying these phrases are relevance (to your business) and search volume.

So, that’s your task for the next two weeks – get around 20 phrases in your spreadsheet. Speak to your colleagues about what they think people would type to find your products and services, if time you may also want to ask some of your existing customers.

Next time we’ll look at where to include your more important phrases within your website. That is, start the actual optimisation process