How to Prioritize Keywords

In our last email we talked about finding keywords and assessing searcher intent. Now that you have a good idea of what people are searching for in your product space, it’s time to prioritize your list...

Two types of keywords that should probably be at the top of your list:

• Keywords that include your brand name and any variations
• Generic terms for your product

So, for example, targeting both “Kleenex” and “facial tissues”.

Appearing in search results for your own brand is clearly important. If people search for you, you should be the first thing they find. Showing up for your brand name alone is generally fairly simple, since modern search engines can typically tell what your brand name is from your URL and headlines on the site.

Many times people will search for some combination of “brand name + product”, or “brand + reviews”, or “brand + location” (e.g. “Nike shoes”, “Honda reviews”, “Target locations”. You will want to explore those variations in your research.

Once you have that part of your list squared away, you can take a look at the generic terms. To prioritize these, you should be examining three factors:

• Search volume
• Competition
• Intent

The holy grail of keywords are terms with high search traffic and low competition.

Search Volume & Competition

The search volume of keywords is typically reported as the average number of searches per month. Measuring competition can be a little more complicated.

You can get a good idea of both search volume and competition from the Google Keyword Planner tool. Input your keyword list, and it will spit out the average searches per month and a competition rating (high, medium, low) for each term. The search numbers are heavily rounded and should be taken with a grain of salt.

The competition rating is for paid ads, not for organic search engine rankings, but it’s still very useful. High advertiser competition for a keyword is a good indication of commercial value (advertisers wouldn’t keep paying to show up for that term if they weren’t getting a return). By the same token, high advertiser competition also tends to indicate higher SEO competition.

A quick way to assess organic ranking competition is just to do a Google search for the keyword you want to check. If the first page of results is filled with well known brands or authoritative sites (such as Amazon, Wikipedia, major news sites, or for motorcycles, brands like Harley Davidson, Honda, etc) you might be in trouble. If you don’t recognize most of the sites on the page, it’s not a sure bet, but you might have a shot.

Getting a Deeper Look at Competition

One tool you can use to dig deeper into keyword competition is the MozBar. This is a browser extension you can install on Chrome or Firefox that will add in data to the list of sites you see when you do a Google search.

The MozBar will give you Moz’s Page Authority and Domain Authority ratings, which they derive from their own assessments of Google’s rankings. These numbers may not be God’s own truth, but outranking pages with high ratings tends to be rather difficult.

Search result pages with a few high-scoring pages in the list aren’t necessarily a bad thing, as long as there’s a few low-scorers in the mix. Those are the sites that you might be able to bump off.

Intent

If you are selling a product or service, keywords with transactional intent will probably be your highest priority. However, you will also want to include other, more informational variations.

Why? Because part of the purchase process includes a general interest phase, followed by a more focused research phase, followed (hopefully) by a purchase.

Providing informational content, with the appropriate keywords, gives you the opportunity to educate customers early in the process. This builds trust, establishes your credibility, and makes it more likely that you will get the sale.

So, if you were selling motorcycle helmets you definitely want your store to show up when someone searches for “buy motorcycle helmet”, but appearing for “best helmets for cruisers” would give you the chance to educate the customer before they’re ready to make the purchase (and if you play your cards right, they might be ready to buy at the end of your explanation).

High Volume + Low Competition + Right Intent

Now you have what you need to get your keyword priorities in order. In our next email we will revisit the question of competition from a different angle. Specifically, how your competitors can help you.