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[Note:  Continued from the Valuable Keywords Tutorial, part I of our Basic Keyword Keyword Strategy Tutorial]

Relevant Keywords

As we mentioned in our keyword strategy tutorial, there are four questions that one needs to answer in order to find those profitable keywords which can help make your search optimization campaign a success.  They are the following:

1. Does the keyword relate to your products or services?
2. Why are your customers searching for any particular keyword?
3. How much competition is there for your keywords?
4. How popular are your keywords?

These four questions are designed to help focus your keyword research efforts on the information that you need to succeed.  Therefore, a better understanding of each of these questions will help improve the quality of your keyword research and thus the quality and (perhaps) quantity of your keywords. 

The First Question:  Relevant keywords
What is it that makes a keyword relevant?  What quality is it that you should look for to determine whether or not a keyword is a good keyword to optimize your site for?  In order to answer this question it is useful take your customer’s point of view.  Remember, your ultimate goal is to attract customers, so obviously it only makes sense to look at things the way that they do. 

What terms or phrases do your customers use when they search for your products or services?  These terms and phrases are exactly what you are looking for; they are the relevant keywords that you want to target.  Why?  Because it is when your customers search for these terms or phrases that they are thinking about and interested in your products and searches.  That is precisely the moment that you want your site to appear before them.  Also, relevant keywords tend to be less competitive and convert better than other, less relevant keywords.  

What does a relevant keyword "look" like?
A general rule of is that a relevant keyword is usually a specific term or phrase.  For instance, take the word "travel".  Someone searching for "travel" maybe interested in "travel guides", "travel insurance", "travel accessories", "travel tours", etc.  However, unless you offer all of those services, this keyword is not particularly relevant to your product or services, it is simply too broad a term (it is also, most likely, too competitive a term).  On the other hand, Guided European Tours or European Travel Tours are excellent keywords if you offered such services.  Less relevant, but more popular, are terms such as European Travel and European Tours. 

On the other hand, be wary of being too specific.  You don’t want to optimize your site for keywords that none of your potential customers are using.  Remember, you want relevant, related keywords that a relatively large number of your potential customers use to search for your products or services.  However, there are some extremely specific keywords that you may want to optimize your site for.  For instance, model numbers.  While oftentimes no one particular model number receives a great deal of search traffic, collectively all of your model numbers may receive quite a bit of
search traffic.  What’s more, someone searching for a model number is very interested in your products.  As such, it is worth optimizing your site for them.   

The Second Question:  Your customers motives
In addition to knowing whether or not a keyword is relevant, we also need to discern (when possible) the motives of your (potential) customers when they search for your products or services online?  Are they interested in buying your products or services?  Are they seeking information?  Are they comparing prices?  These questions, and others like them, are crucial to ask because they will influence the order in which we optimize our keywords as well as the type of page that we create for each keyword (we will discuss different types of web pages in our Sales Conversion Tutorials).

For instance, the first set of keywords that you want to optimize your site for are those keywords which your customers use when they are actively looking to buy your products or services.  For these keywords you will want to create sales pages which are designed to convert your visitors into customers (for more on converting visitors into customers see our Sales Conversion Tutorials).  These keywords will, statistically speaking, convert more often to sales for your website than other types of keywords (such as keywords your customers use to gather information).  Later on, once you have built and optimized your buying keyword pages, you can build and optimize informational pages so as to attract even more relevant visitors.  You can then funnel those visitors to your sales pages wherein you can convert them into customers (for more on funneling your visitors to your sales pages see our Sales Conversion Tutorials).  The more precisely you can identify the reasons why your customers are using your keywords the better you will be able to a) prioritize your keywords and b) create pages which relate to those keywords. 

In general, keywords can be divided into three categories:

1. Buying keywords
   These are the keywords that your customers use when they are actively looking at that moment to purchase your products or services. 
    

2. Research keywords
   These are the keywords that your customers use when they are preparing to purchase your product or service at a later time.  That later time may be 5 minutes from now, 5 hours, 5 days, or 5 months; the crucial point is that the search is not done with the intention of buying a product or service.
    

3.  Academic keywords
   An academic search is a search which is not at all motivated by a desire and/or interest in buying a product or service.

Note, however, that while some keywords can easily be classified into these three categories, other keywords are more ambiguous.  Compare, for instance, the following three keywords: 

1. Buy Canon PowerShot A510
2. Canon PowerShot A510 Review
3. Digital Camera Tutorial

Each of these keywords can easily be categorized.  The first keyword is most likely a buying keyword, the second keyword a research keyword, and the third keyword a academic keyword.  However, now note the following keyword: 

• Canon PowerShot A510 Best Price?

Is this a buying keyword or a browsing keyword?  That is to say, when your customers use this search term are they looking to buy a Canon PowerShot A510, all they want to know is who has the best price, and once they find that out they will whip out the credit card and make a purchase?  Or, alternatively, perhaps they are still researching and are just curious to know what the best price is for the Canon PowerShot A510?  Without further information it seems hard to know.  However, if you properly track our keywords and how they perform then you may be able to determine how your real life customers actually use your keywords.  For instance, if you notice that a particularly high percentage of the people who arrive at your site after searching for this keyword ended up buying that product then you could safely assume that for your customers this is a buying keyword.  If, on the other hand, a particularly low percentage of the people who arrived at your site after searching for this keyword ended up buying this product then you would reach the opposite conclusion, namely that this is a research keyword.  And, obviously, if the results are somewhere in-between then you would conclude that it is mixed (to learn more about how to track the results of your search optimization campaign see our Web Analytics for SEO Tutorial).

Next tutorial: Keyword Competition
Previous tutorial: Valuable Keywords

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This tutorial written by:
Moshe Morris
President of SEMBasics
Chief Research Analyst at Internet Marketing Initiative (www.internetmi.com)

The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book Winning The Search Engine Wars.
To learn more about Search Engine News, click here.