What is keyword analysis?

Those of us who work in the web industry tend to bandy about the terms keywords and search phrases without a care in the world, so let's just define those before we get started.

What are search phrases and keywords?

Search phrases are the words, or collections of words that people enter into search engines, such as Google. For example, if you wanted a plumber and you lived in Manchester, you would enter 'plumber manchester' into Google, Yahoo or Bing. So, 'plumber manchester' would be your search phrase.

Keywords (also called key phrases) are basically reflections of search phrases, that you scatter all over your website with the intention that Google, Yahoo and Bing will read the, see that that's what you're about and list you for the appropriate thing. For example, if you are a plumber based in manchester, your ideal keywords would be 'plumber manchester'.

So in essence you want keywords on your website that directly reflect the things that people are entering into Google.

So how do I know what people are searching for on Google?

That's an excellent question. You could, like some people, just randomly guess, based on what you might put in. The problem is, you are unlikely to have the same mindset as your customer and are much more likely to use technical jargon that would never occur to your customers.

So instead, you could do Keyword Analysis and find out from the data which key phrases people are actually entering into the search engines. Google provides this data and will give you a list of the actual key phrases people have entered.

Now I know what people are searching for, let's go for all of them!

Not so fast.

You can try to chase every relevant key phrase if you have enough funds to buy yourself a big enough website and a full time promoter. If you don't, you'll have to start making choices.

Remember, you're essentially competing with every other company that offers your products that has a website, and that might mean some multi-billion dollar international corporations. Unless you have the kind of budget to throw at it that they do - you're going to have to work a bit smarter.

Size Matters

Let's use a combat metaphor to try to explain how this works.

Imagine each page on your website buys you some ammunition, and being top of the listings on your chosen keywords is your target.

So if you have a website with thousands of pages, then you have a lot of ammunition and a lot of options.

However, if you only have a ten page site, you really don't have much ammunition at all.
Now the question is - what are you going to do with your ammunition?

Well, you could focus on one target, focus on it really hard and throw everything you've got at it. You've probably got a fair chance of knocking it out.

Alternatively, you could square up to two hundred targets and spray your ammunition at all of them. Sure, you might hit some, but so weakly, they'll barely notice.

It's the same with SEO - if you have a tight focus on just one or two key phrases you have a good chance of getting to the top of the listings. But if you spread all your efforts too thinly, you'll fail to achieve anything at all.

So how do I know which key phrases to select as my targets?

The best way is to take into account two factors: search volumes and competitor volumes.
Search volumes are the number of people that use a particular phrase to search for a product or service, and they're not always what you'd expect. For example:

Which do you think has more searches - solicitor / solicitors / lawyer / lawyers?

Answers:

• Solicitor - 368,000
• Solicitors - 1,000,000
• Lawyer - 368,000
• Lawyers - 246,000

(true at the time of writing, based on Google data over the preceding month)

So based on the data above, which keyword do you think would be best to target?

The other side is competitor volumes, which means how many other people are also trying to get to the top of Google for a particular keyphrase.

Would you rather compete against 1,000 people or 10 people?

It's also possible to access data about this, and by comparing search volumes to competitor volumes, hopefully you can find that sweet spot where there is a phrase that plenty of people are searching on, but not many competitors realise, so you can swoop in and pick up all that traffic from under their noses.

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