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Video Transcript: Understanding keyword targets. I just wanted to talk about keywords and how I do keyword selection. Understanding the keywords, I suppose there are two types of keywords that a lot of people think about.
Browsing phrase vs. buying phrase. There are browsing phrases and then there are buying phrases. A browsing phrase is, if someone has typed camera in Google, and imagine getting into the head space, almost imagine drifting out of your mind and then drifting down into the searcher. What is the searcher thinking? They’re probably thinking, I just want some general information about cameras. I’m still in the research mode. I’m not at the point yet where I’m going to make a purchase.
That’s going to be vastly different from someone who is using a buying phrase. A buying phrase might be the Sony Handycam HDR-S11. That’s when I’m looking for specific model and I know exactly what it is that I’m going after. So when we target keywords, typically speaking, the browsing phrases may have a higher number of searches but they’re not going to convert nearly as highly as one of these more targeted, longer tail phrases.
When I have a look at working with local business, the same sort of thing applies and I try and get in the head space of what would the person who wants to find a dentist be looking for. They might not necessarily type dentist. They’re looking for a dentist in a specific area. A lot of what we actually do with local business, it’s all about geographic targeting and making sure we’re targeting the right suburbs and the right spaces. So again just talking about imagining yourself drifting out of your head, down into your searcher, and imagine yourself as you are that person. That’s the best advice I can give you on that.
Building your keywords. As far as the way I build keywords for local businesses, it varies significantly when I compare the way that I build keywords for the stock market niche and some of the other niches that I operate in, relative to local business.
How is local business different? Traffic + conversions. When we first started working with a few clients, we installed Google Analytics and I was monitoring the stats. I’m used to dealing with websites that are getting over a thousand unique visitors a day because I’m in these hypercompetitive niches.
Then I come to the dentist’s website, and then I see a spike. Sure we doubled the traffic and you’re now getting 30 uniques a day. But in my mind, I’m sitting there saying, what’s going on here? Then when I talk to the client, the client is absolutely over the moon because they’re so much more highly targeted. If someone is searching ‘dentist South Yarra,’ they’ve got a real need that they want solved right now and they convert incredibly highly. So when you compare doing local search and local online marketing, you can get a lot less traffic but they’ll convert at a lot higher rate.
Identify top services / products. So the way that I actually go through and identify what keywords I’m going to work with for a particular client, we already have an idea as part of that initial research to find out what are their top products and services. I make sure that I understand those products and
services.
Use Google free keyword tool / Market Samurai. Then I jump over to the best keyword research tool, the Google free keyword tool. If you haven’t seen that, just head over to Google and search Google free keyword tool and it will be the number one listing. Or you can use Market Samurai. You can get away with using the Google free keyword tool, it’s free, it’s a good place to start. Once you say, yes, this is something that I want to get into, you might look at investing in Market Samurai.
Question: Could you explain really quickly what the keyword tool actually does?
Answer: Yes, let’s just quickly pop over to Google.
So the main reason I use this, I’ll go for the root product and service that the client is offering. So it might be root canal or it might be ISO consulting. I’ll find out what the root service is they’re looking for, and then I’ll search it within this free keyword tool to determine if it’s something that someone is searching. Now, how this varies when I compare local business to my stock market business, I do a lot deeper analysis to determine what keywords I can go after based on how much competition there is.
Like I said, in the SEO space and also the stock market space, we’re going after some pretty big competitors. So I need to make sure I’m picking the right keywords that someone else hasn’t built a whole lot of back links to and done a lot of SEO work. But when I work with local business, it’s completely different. You should be able to dominate, Melbourne, insert industry name, like that. I’ll always go for the most competitive phrases I can find.
So for example, having a look, you can turn on some columns and turn off columns. I’m just having a look under customized columns here. Just make sure you turn on your global monthly view. If I have a look here, these are the types of phrases. I just want to make sure that I’ve got phrases that people are actually searching for. So if I had a decision that I needed to make, am I going to choose implant dentists or am I going to choose cosmetic dentists because I’ve only got a certain number of pages that I can optimize on the website until we start building the blog with them. I’ll go for cosmetic dentists.
So in the local space, I always go for the most competitive term that I can because we’ll just drop in the area modifier in front and you should have no worries going for it. If you think about the psychology of the way we selected Melbourne SEO Services, think about that. We went for Melbourne SEO Services, we dominated that space almost straight away for Melbourne SEO Services and we’ve only been in the SEO space for a few months after the start of this year.
We’re already in position number one for that. The good thing about targeting the keywords as I’m teaching you how to do it now is then, once you do that, all of your link building benefit that you’ve been funneling back to that page going for Melbourne SEO Services, we can now break the word down and go for the tighter niche which is SEO services.
We’ve already got Melbourne SEO Services and all of that link building and good work that I’m going to go through this afternoon. All of it still applies and runs over to this keyword because it is like a broken-down version of it. So now you can see we’re going for SEO space and just under the Maps, and we’re on Google Local there. When you consider we’re going up against SEO companies here in Australia, we’ve been online for three months and we’re already just behind LTSEO – Mark and Dan, I’m coming for you. We’ll get that spot. I think if you keep that in mind, going after these local markets, it’s a walk in the park.
Target best keywords and add area modifiers. You need to just target the best keywords and add the modifiers. With the modifiers, I’d start off by going for Melbourne as your modifier if you’re in Melbourne, or whatever the biggest area is in your local area. Then later on, we will go for the suburbs. You might go for Preston. You might go for Doncaster. All those types of things. But we’ll do that in the
blog once we start to build ongoing work.
I hope these online keyword research tips will encourage you to carefully choose the words that represent your brand. Want to maximize the presence of these keywords online? Make a video out of it. We’re here to help. Contact our team for more details.
