First of all let me apologise for the lack of activity on here recently, life is pretty busy at the moment and despite having lots to say the blog has had to take a back seat, however over the last month a lot has happened in the world of search, therefore lots to talk about.

One thing we have been noticing recently is how effective hubs are at generating rankings for core keywords, hubs have always been used to increase relevance but very recently they seem to have been given a little more weight.

What Do I Mean By a Hub?

At one point in the not so distant past if you wanted to rank you would create a well optimised landing page and link build to it. Depending on how competitive the term was you could probably get a top 5 ranking within a few month.

A hub is creating the landing page but also creating 5 – 10 relevant pages linked to from the landing page all using variations of the main term. Creating hubs on your site needs to be a priority at the moment as sites that do it are benefiting from higher rankings and more traffic.

E.g.

If you wanted to target the keyword ‘dog clippers’ fly over to the Google keyword tool and see what kind of hubs you can create:

In terms of structure it might look something like this;

You can create multiple hubs on your domain targeting any areas relevant to your niche.

Where to Target Links

Around a year ago when you only had one landing page you would have built links into the one page with variations of the keywords, however I personally feel the best way to link build is by targeting all pages within the hub with the most relevant anchor text to that particular page.

How Could This Work On An E Commerce Site?

E Commerce sites tend to have thousands of products under one category, do they really need to link build to thousands of pages?

Of course not, it wouldn’t be scalable, however you could break some of your main categories into sub categories and link build that way, just how I have set out above.

Creating more variation in your on page optimisation as well as the anchor text will produce better results across the full keyword range and assist in increasing relevant traffic.

If you are serious about SEO and increasing search traffic then it is important to track it, not just by logging into your analytics everyday but by keeping in depth records of which keywords are driving traffic and any abnormal fluctuations.

Working in an SEO agency it is important to track this for clients, you may increase a clients traffic tenfold but how are you going to prove the increase was due to your efforts?

One of the best ways to keep track of search traffic is to break it down into longtail and broad terms. At a glance you can quickly see any increases or decreases in traffic; this will help you to quickly jump on any opportunities or issues.

Using Google Analytics

In my experience there is no better traffic analysis tool than Google Analytics. It gives you so many ways to break down traffic and spot changes that it is literally a no brainer.

Using Google Analytics to track longtail traffic is fairly straight forward; however let’s just define what we mean by longtail;

Many people consider longtail traffic to be 3 words or more, however I and most experienced SEO’s I know consider longtail traffic to be any keyword that drives small amounts of traffic but has no real competition.

On that note let’s go over to analytics and break this down a little, the first thing you need to do is pull up the keywords your website was found on in the last month, then use the advanced filter at the bottom of the keywords to highlight any keywords that sent less than 5 visits.

These will all be longtail keywords, however in order to get an idea of growth and how they’re performing you need to see data from previous months;

Analytics allows you to view a direct comparison to previous months and allows you to see how your traffic is growing, or not.

It will also allow you to quickly see which keywords underperformed compared to previous months;

http://www.seowizz.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/comparisonkeyword.png

Now because I am a little bit of a geek and an obsessive SEO I like to keep track of this on a month to month basis, this allows me to see how my site has performed over a longer period of time and I use excel to help me track monthly increases and decreases with regards to search traffic on all levels;

The graph works by calculating the increases and decreases in traffic based on the amount of searches a particular keyword receives on a month by month basis.

From the above graph (which is based on SEO wizz) we can see that traffic was down in December all round with every type of keyword taking a hit, we can also see an increase in traffic in March on the keywords driving 200 or more searches a month, this correlates well with my first page rankings for “SEO” and “Search engine optimisation”, I no longer rank first page for SEO but when I did it drove a lot of traffic.

More importantly and for no apparent reason I saw a massive drop off in longtail terms or terms bringing 10 or less visits per month, this is in line with the longtail drop off reported by SEOmoz a couple of weeks ago.

Breaking down your traffic month by month noticing differences in search traffic on all levels will help you understand what part of your SEO strategy is working and highlight algorithm changes, like the one reported by Richard Baxter at SEO Gadget.

If you’re serious about SEO this is a must, how you monitor it is up to you but it is vital that you break down the different keyword levels.

One of the most fundamental aspects of SEO is being able to pick keywords that are going to give you a return on investment. Niche keywords are those with a high search volume but low competition, you can rank for these very quickly, however first you have to be sure that you are going to make a return.

Before we get into the meat of this post I want to clarify that the techniques I am going to discuss are no secret and many internet marketers use them to find niche keywords, I obviously add my own tweaks to the process as experience tells me certain figures and measurements work better.

Also let me make it clear this process is far too time consuming for optimising posts and other deep pages, this research is to use when you start a new site based around a niche topic for the sole purpose of converting the traffic.

There are two things I want to make clear in this post;

A – How to find niche keywords

B – How you can tell if a particular keyword is going to be profitable

First thing I need to stress is that if you’re thinking about targeting the ‘make money online’ sphere, forget it. I consider myself an accomplished SEO and would not even consider starting down that path for two reasons; 1) competition is fierce 2) even though I could beat them I think my energy is spent better elsewhere and so is yours

Some Guiding Principles

We have already established that niche keywords are those with traffic but little competition, however how on earth do we know if they will be profitable. The truth is you never actually do however there are a few things we can do to narrow down the process.

First of all any niche keywords need to be “buying keywords”, keywords that searches input in order to buy a particular product to buy. Whether you are monetising with adsense, affiliate links or actual products this principle is fundamental, if the visitor hasn’t come by way of a buying keyword they are not going to click or purchase.

So it makes sense to me, to start our search for niche keywords on sites like Ebay or the mighty Amazon, here you will find hundreds of products to target, scroll through some and then let’s move to the next step.

Using The Google Keyword Tool

Yes it’s my favourite, the good old Google Keyword Tool and we are going to use it to work out which keywords are going to give us a good profit.

Here’s a quick example on the keyword ‘bracelets’, I don’t target this niche nor do I intend to, this is simply an example.

There are a couple of things you will notice from the picture and I want you to set up your keyword list in the same way.

1) Change the Match Type to Exact – This shows the amount of searches for the exact keyword on Google

2) Lose every column except the CPC price and the monthly global search

3) Order your list by the largest to the smallest search volume

4) Once this is in order download the keywords using the .csv (for excel) link

You should have a list of keywords that looks like this (You can order the columns as you wish)

Now what we need to do is estimate the income column.

Estimating Keyword Income

I must warn you at this point, we need to make a number of guesses and use a little math to figure out how much ranking for a particular keyword could be worth.

The only way we can work out potential income is by taking the Cost per Click into account and presume were trying to make money from adsense on our sites, this is not accurate but in my experience it is the ‘most’ accurate way to understand keyword potential.

So to do the Maths we do the following;

1) Multiply the Estimated Avg CPC by .25 – We are presuming that Google pays around 25% of the cost per click to the adsense publisher

2) Then multiply this amount by the monthly search volume

Now even if we get a no.1 ranking we are not going to take all the traffic and my experience you will only see about 35% of the traffic figure, so….

3) We multiply the amount by .35

4) Finally we multiply the running figure by .04 (This is presuming we can generate a 4% click through rate and most adsense optimised sites will exceed this percentage)

On your spreadsheet the sum will look like this;

Once we tap enter it will give us a monthly income figure for the first line like so;

That’s right people a number one ranking for the keywords bracelets could be worth about £4782.40 in adsense income or $7651.84. If you doubt that much money can be actually made ask yourself first, have you ever had a number 1 ranking in Google? For a product related keyword??

Of course the figures are not pin point accurate but I believe they give you a great idea about how profitable a niche is, this is how internet and affiliate marketers make money

Now of course you might not want to spend the next two years of your life attempting to rank for bracelets, however there are lots more keywords to go at with less competition.

Just look at some of the other keywords you could pursue and be ranking for in the next 6 months given the right SEO strategy.

I have not competitively analysed these keywords so I do not know what kind of competition they have, if you like the look of these keywords you will have to check out the top five on Google, below I’ll give you some guiding principles

Understanding the Competition

This is the main part people tend to get mixed up.

If you want to target a heavy niche then forget this part and just be prepared to work at it for a few years for a big return.

If you want to target lots of small niches do the following;

1) Search the chosen keyword on Google

2) Check the PageRank of the top 5 sites if any are a PageRank 4 or above move on, unless they do not use the ‘exact keyword’ in the title tag

3) Check the link popularity using yahoo links count (download the SEObook plugin SEO for Firefox) Any pages with ‘page’ link popularity of over 1000 then move on, unless the keyword is not in the title tag

What we are aiming to do here is target niches that we can rank for very quickly and start earning within 4 months, hopefully ranking in the top 5 after 6 months SEO work.

So there you have it!!!!

If you want to create a profitable niche you must first make sure the keywords are capable of pulling in the money.

Disclaimer – I have to say at this point that the above is not accurate and click value may differ depending on multiple factors, this is a system I and many other internet marketers recommend

I can’t finish this post without giving credit to the internet marketers that I know use this system.

Court and Mark at the Keyword Academy teach pretty much the same methods for locating profitable niches, they have a membership site which goes into a ton more detail, so if you are interested in this form of SEO you should check it out.

The methods I use, even though are very similar to others, differ slightly, as you do this more and more you will find out what works and what doesn’t. It can be a painful process but you make fewer mistakes the more you do it.

This is not a ‘make money online’ site

I am mindful that this sort of posts ventures into the ‘online money’ realm, I am mindful that I want SEO wizz to remain an SEO blog, however there is no getting away from the fact SEO is closely related with generating an income online. The make money arena is not for everyone, still even if you own a different sort of site this is great method of checking the potential of the keywords you are targeting.

Anyway hope everyone got something from it.

Is there any real need for on page optimisation anymore? All of my research on the SERPS seems to be pointing in 1 direction and that is, when it comes to high rankings for competitive terms only your link profile really matters.

After all Google is still ranking number 2 for the keyword “caffeine” even though all it does is slap it in the title tag and has a shed load of links, the result is only relevant to somebody searching for it from an internet marketing background, those wanting information on a mild drug are going to be disappointed.

Anyway, as well as examples like the above and ongoing comments in the SEO industry about ‘how headings are no longer of value’ I decided to carry out a little research myself.

The research was based on the heading tags h1 – h4 and on general keyword density. Like with so many of the other tests I perform this one was based on 25 search terms and the top 8 results were examined.

Headings Optimisation

I guess the first place to start is with the headings, it is an area I also believe has lost most of its value but let’s peak at the results before coming to a conclusion.

For those of you who aren’t sure how headings are supposed to work with SEO, basically it is taught that you should use your keyword in them to build relevance h1 holding the most weight and decreasing accordingly to h6.

The first test was simple, ranking pages 1-8 were tested to see if they had optimised their heading tags for the target keyword.

A score was given to each heading optimised on each site h1 = 8 h2 = 6 etc… The ranking position with the highest score had obviously better optimised headings.

As you can see from the graph the blue line represents the true ranking order and the red line is how it would rank if rankings were based on optimised headings.

There are massive differences here and even though this is correlation and not causation I still feel it is a strong indication that headings are not quite as valuable as one may think.

If you look at the below chart;

62.5% of pages on the first page have the h1 optimised for the target keyword, however 0% have the h4 optimised.

I can also confirm that 15% of the pages tested had not optimised any headings.

The only thing we can take from this is that if you are going to optimise your headings, stick to h1 and h2 the rest seem to be irrelevant but don’t expect it to work miracles for your rankings because it won’t.

Keyword Density

In this test the same 25 pages were checked for keyword density rates against the target phrase. The percentages were taken and the below chart shows the results.

Even I was surprised at these results, when re ranked the sites there was almost a complete reverse with the lowest ranking sites having the highest keyword density.

So what does this mean??

Keep things to a natural level use the keyword naturally but don’t feel under pressure to use it in every paragraph because it clearly does not matter.

Where does this leave on page optimisation?

Well what can I say?

First of all there is a lot more to on page search engine optimisation other than keyword issues;

- Crawlability
- Internal Linking
- Sitemaps
- Click Paths
- Code to Content Ratio

etc…..

However in my opinion the days of stressing over keyword density, keyword proximity or prominence are over along with heading optimisation, it just is not as powerful as it once was.

The only place to worry about your keywords, in my opinion, is in your title tag, outbound links and obviously try and get it in the content a couple of times. Apart from that the jobs a good one.

There are obviously a few areas I didn’t touch on;

- How does this apply to longtail keywords?
- Does keyword position matter? Top, bottom, sidebar, footer
- I also did not take into account image alt attributes

These are all posts for another time. So quit worrying about how many times you’ve stuffed your keyword into your content and start building some links

Hello one and all

Sorry I know this week has been thin on the posts but my schedule has been hectic and I have had a few technical issues, but hey I’m scraping one in before the end of the week.

I’ll be honest with you my brain is fried this week so thinking of an innovative post has proved challenging, therefore I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to follow up on one of the many SEO tests I conduct.

You may or may not recall that I wrote a post around a month ago about using longtail keywords to gradually build search traffic using your blog.

You can read the post “increase organic search traffic” but the bones of it was the idea of optimising each post for low traffic longtail keywords. I demonstrated how you could effectively use the google adwords keyword tool to find this low hanging fruit and how to implement the keywords for maximum effect.

Making this process a permanent part of your blogging schedule will slowly but surely build your search engine traffic, month after month. This is the answer to the question I am asked most often;

“How did you manage to build your search traffic to nearly 10,000 visitors a month in just 7 months???” Well this is how, optimising for the niche keywords.

Many bloggers say to start 100′s of different blogs all targeting niche longtail keywords in order to make money online with search traffic, I say built an authority site in a broad niche and treat every post like a new page, research your keywords and optimise, simple right??

If you’re still a little sceptical about all this let me show you a little evidence, go back to the post “increasing organic traffic”, you will see it’s a fairly straight forward post optimised in all the right places. I targeted around 15 niche keywords in it, knowing that it could increase my search traffic every month by around 15 – 40 visits. Yes, this doesn’t sound like much but just imagine doing this for every post, think of the difference over a year. If I told you in 12 months you could have between 10 and 15 thousand search visits a month by implementing a simple tactic, would you implement it?? It’s so easy you’d be a fool not to.

Anyway time for the evidence, I published the post on 10th September, here are the ‘search’ stats to date:-

As you can see 29 views from 16 keywords, in 1 month.

Here are the top ten keywords

Now overall I had around 700 visits to this post most from social traffic and directly from the feed, but you cannot ignore the search traffic.

The search traffic will be pretty consistent month after month, and even though it’s only 30 a month, thats only 1 post. I may publish 100 more posts this year, if they all drive 30 visits to my site a month thats 9000 visits by the end of the year.

So if you implement the longtail, link build as normal to your main pages and blog posts there is no reason within 1 year you should not be getting 10,000 visits from the engines every month, minimum.

I hope I have sold you on this technique, even if your site is more commercially focused, yes the longtail will not convert as well as the broader high converting keywords, however can you really afford not to implement this simple tactic??

One word of warning with this, it will not work if you have not built a solid link profile for your domain. Your site needs some authority, the more authority the better this technique will work.

Have a great weekend and I’ll be back next week with my usual blogging schedule.

Keyword research is an often underestimated part of SEO; just pick the high traffic keywords, right? Well not exactly, you see there are two main types of keywords from a marketing perspective, converting keywords and informational keywords.

Converting keywords are those which are more likely to lead to a sale, usually lower in search volume but obviously more profitable.

Informational keywords drive traffic that wants information, advice or an answer to a question; these keywords tend to have high search volumes but a much lower conversion rate.

A good example of the informational and converting keywords are “SEO” (informational) and “SEO Services” (converting), even though the broad keyword SEO will drive treble the amount of traffic, SEO services is more likely to end in a sale relating to SEO.

Many sites implement a good mixture of each type of keyword, however some sites are purely ecommerce sites and only want traffic that converts well, in order to do this they need to know which keywords carry commercial intent, which keywords drive buying traffic.

Commercial intent is not the be all and end all as far as SEO is concerned, SEO can drive ROI up but SEO is also used to create brand awareness, increase in organic traffic and increase in rank for relevant keywords. Anyway let’s stick with commercial intent for now and see what we can do to discover how profitable a keyword may be.

The Google Keyword Tool

Yes it’s my favourite keyword tool but it really can give you a great idea with regards to which keywords drive buying traffic.

Take a quick look at the below results for a search on the keyword “search engine optimisation”, the exact term drives the most traffic but it is not the one I would bet on as far as conversions are concerned.

“search engine optimisation marketing” and “google search engine optimisation” are both more attractive targets if you were looking for higher conversion rates.

Marketers who invest in Adwords are generally not idiots, they know what keywords bring in buying traffic, thats their job, trust them and use the google keyword tool to decide what sells.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out I target search engine optimisation, however because I am looking for a good mixture I also target google search engine optimisation, for some high converting traffic. (These are mega competitive terms and in 7 months I am Page 3 for “search engine optimisation” and 2nd for “google search engine optimisation” , I will be up there with the best, just need a little more time on these ones )

Microsoft commercial intent tool

Microsoft have also helped us out here with a smart little tool.

The tool basically assesses the commercial intent of a given keyword based on conversion rates. Each keyword is given a score between 0 and 1.0, any keyword that has a score above 0.5, has some commercial intent, the closer you get to 1.0 the more profitable the keyword will be, for example;

Search engine optimisation scrapes through with a little commercial intent.

SEO services is much more of a converting or transactional keyword, if you are selling search engine optimisation services this would be the keyword to use.

Microsoft claims this tool has been verified by human evaluators and has around a 90% accuracy rate so it is definitely worth adding to your SEO arsenal.

Commercial intent is worth assessing if your site is selling a specific product or group of products, I also think it is worth taking into consideration even if your site is information based as you may eventually wish to sell advertising space, advertisers pay for converting traffic so it makes sense to target converting keywords.

I hope you found this useful and can implement it effectively

One of the things I am often asked is “how did you manage to increase your search engine traffic so quick?”.

I have been working on this blog for around 8 months now and to be honest building search traffic to around 350 a day, I don’t think it’s that big a deal, anyway let me first explain something.

A web page can only ever be optimised for 2 or 3 keywords, anymore than that and your simply giving your page too much work to do. So you have to create more and more content in order to drive the maximum amount of search content, easy.

OK, in order to drive as much free search engine traffic to your site as possible you also need to choose your keywords wisely and implement them correctly. This is where many webmasters lose the plot a little. I work with many clients who wish to chase high traffic terms and this is fine, however you cannot completely close your eyes on all the easy longtail keywords, these are the ones that can drive some major traffic to your site if focused on over the long term.

I was prompted to write this post after watching Rand’s video over on SEOmoz earlier today. Rand does a great job of describing the longtail but fails to tell us all how to implement it, however this is where SEOwizz steps in.

Some pointers if you could not be bothered to go to SEOmoz and watch the post are as follows;

• 75% of all search’s are longtail keywords
• 20% of search’s everyday are completely unique to Google’s algorithm

Enough said I think, this is something to be looked at in further detail.

The first thing I did before even sitting down and writing this post was to do a little research, it’s a dead easy method from my affiliate marketing days that helps generate some low competition keywords. These keywords may generate very little search traffic every month, however think of the difference in a year if every one of your blog posts were targeted.

Let me explain why I have used this technique in the past; in my early days of internet marketing I was pretty quick to jump on the Adwords band wagon, not from reading some get rich quick article but by doing my own research and selling affiliate products on Adwords. I was pretty good at it but high traffic keywords soon became far too expensive and paying more than $1 a click made no sense for promoting affiliate products. So in order to get the cheaper traffic I had to focus on the cheaper keywords and I had to find lots of them in order to make any campaign profitable.

So how did I find the keywords? Let me show you a small example and this is still what I do when I begin writing a keyword focused post and this is exactly why I have been able to build increasing search traffic month on month.

The First Step

Well you should know what you’re going to write about at this point so head over to the Google Keyword Tool, I have always found this to be the most accurate tool. OK, in the description box type in a broad keyword that describes what you’re going to write about. For this post I tapped in “search engine traffic”, yes very broad but were going to narrow it down.

Anyway here is an example of the results I got;

As you can see there are a number of related terms and guess what were going to use all of them to dig into to some lovely longtail keywords, even in the first set of results there are some pretty low competition keywords, but let’s take this a little further.

Add all the related keywords to your basket, and re type each one into the description box, this will give you more related terms, any you don’t already have in the basket add them to it.

Remember to do a keyword search for every related term, you will find new variations and at the end should have a nice list of related keywords that are mainly low competition.

It is important to remember you are searching for related terms and not ‘suggestions’; we are optimising the page for similar variations not completely different ones.

The Second Step

By now you should have a list of low competition keywords that look a little something like this, here are mine for this post.

These are the keywords that are going to be the focus of the new post and that are hopefully going to drive web traffic to our page. You should pick a keyword that incorporates a little traffic with less competition and then use that as part of your post/article title. Then you should use as many variations as possible throughout the body of the article, maybe opt to have the list of keywords in a screen minimized so you can keep looking over it in order to add variations naturally into your content.

So just to make sure I am making this clear;

• Choose a broad keyword relating to what you writing about
• Pick out some of the longtial keyword variations
• Carry out a keyword search using each variation to find more low competition longtail keywords
• Once you have a list of keywords somewhere between 10 – 20, depending on the niche, start writing and incorporate the longtails NATURALLY

YES, this is not going to flood your site with traffic after one post; however it may give you anywhere between 1 and 20 visitors a month per post.

Target keywords in at least one post a week and you will soon see the traffic building up.

Not every post I write is keyword targeted and aimed at increasing organic search engine traffic, however I do try to use a good mixture and this is the reason I have been able to build up a consistent amount of search engine traffic to SEOwizz.

Even if you own a 100% commercial site you cannot fail to ignore the potential in targeting these keywords, yes it will take time but that is what SEO is all about, strategy and patience.

I am going to monitor the search traffic to this page over the next month and show you all the results to prove how this works and how effective it is at increasing web traffic.

You may also note that this post is pretty long and there is a very good reason for writing long posts…..

You can target more keywords = Get more traffic!!

Until next time, keep smiling

Well I am back, blogging again. Enjoyed my extended weekend break and ready to pump out some more SEO posts

I regularly receive emails from readers asking for advice on various SEO issues ranging from tips and tricks to major search penalty issues. Some I am happy to give a quick answer to others require consulting hours.

One thing that is often asked is how and when to use keywords in the URL and what effect this has on rankings. Now instead of me simply answering this I thought I’d show you a brief study I looked at around a month ago.

As an SEO I am continually testing different areas of optimisation to find out what is really working and what is not that important. I performed the following study using 10 competitive keywords, the ten broad keywords were also tested against similar longtail versions.

The aim was to see what correlation, if any, keywords in the URL had on high rankings within Google.

Test 1

I took the 10 broad keywords in competitive niches and analysed the top ten URL’s to see which included the broad terms. Keywords such as “search engine optimisation”, “car loans” and “credit cards” were looked at with the following results;

As you can see on average 50% of the sites in the top ten included the “broad” keyword phrase in the URL. When I say URL I am making reference to the whole URL and not just the root domain.

The results also seemed to show there was no difference between keywords in a file extension and the root domain

eg. www.keywordusedhere.com = root domain

and

www.rootdomain.com/keywordusedhere = extension

As long as the keyword was used somewhere in the URL it seemed to have some sort of positive impact on rankings.

Test 2

I couldn’t just test the broad terms, I also needed to see how longtail terms could be used in the URL to increase rankings. I took the same broad keywords and changed them to a longtail phrase to see how rankings changed.

Only 27% of sites ranking for longtail keywords used the exact “longtail” term in the URL. This was very low so I decided to look at it from a different angle.

Test 3

I decided to analyse the rankings for the longtail terms to see how many URL’s had used the ‘broad’ keyword phrase.

eg.
Search = low cost car loans
Broad Term in URL = car loans

Anyway here’s the difference.

47% of pages ranking for a longtail term had the broad keyword phrase in the URL.

eg. A search for “bad credit loans” reveals that not too many pages have the exact search term in, however over 50% have the broad term “loan” in the URL.

What does this tell us?

Even though the test was only carried out on 10 broad terms and 10 longtail terms, it gives us some insights into how Google treats keywords in the URL.

• If you want to rank for broad competitive terms, it is a good idea to have the keyword in the URL
• If your attempting to rank for a longtail, low competition keyword there is no real need to use the exact term as long as you use the broad term.

Overall I don’t think I would really be concerned about keywords in the URL as it only seems to be a minor ranking factor, remember 50% of the sites ranking in the top ten did not use the keywords at all.

If you do a search for “seo services” (which is a major competitive keyword) you will be lucky to find one listing with the keyword in the URL.

So final tip, if you can get the “main” keyword in the URL do it, if not.. Don’t lose any sleep over it as focusing on the more powerful factors will still help push your site to the top of Google.

There are many people out there who no bits of SEO here and there. Optimise title tags, write great content, get some links, you know that kind of thing. Do you really know how to go about SEO campaigns though? Where to start, how to analyse data and ultimately how to best action your results.

I wanted to take a little time today to show you how we go through an SEO campaign here at SEO wizz. As always I love to use real life examples to demonstrate points, so I have picked a site and a target keyword to look at, to show you how we run through a basic campaign.

This is a very basic run through put together for the purposes of a post, reports we generate for clients usually take weeks to put together

The keyword I picked is a local term “estate agents leeds”, it is pretty competitive and receives a good amount of search traffic. The site I decided to look at was Morfitt Shaw an estate agents in Leeds.

They sit half way down the first page for the choosen keyword, a place where it is difficult to move from due to the heavy competition above, nevertheless it is a position that can be improved on, especially on specific keyword terms.

Anyway this is how I would start out the campaign:-

Keyword Research

This is the first step to any campaign, some clients know them others are clueless. I am not going to go over how to pick your keywords, for more details on this see Think Like a Buyer and Better Keyword Research. These will give you the basics of choosing your keywords with simple straight forward techniques.

One other thing we need to take care of as part of keyword research is the difficulty level. In order to be able to assess our chances of ranking we need to know how many people are targeting it. SEOMoz have a great tool for assessing keyword difficulty, but if you don’t want to spend any money here is a less accurate, free way:-

- Go to the Google Keyword Tool.

- Type in your search phrase making sure your location is correct.

- Type in your keyword and search, once your results appear change the settings to exact match from the drop down menu.

- You should now have a set of results that look like this;

- The greenbar before the keyword shows how competitive the keyword is with advertisers. This is also a strong indication of how well optimised the sites are in the organic results. The more people targeting it in adwords means the more people target it in organic search.

- If you want an accurate cost per click for your keyword, highlight the keyword and the green bar (trust me) and copy it into the search box. This will give you the max cost per click being paid. Neat trick I think.

You should obviously continue your keyword research finding relevant variations and taking note of the competition. For now we will go down the “estate agents leeds” keyword line.

Competition Analysis

In my opinion this is the most important part of an SEO campaign. It involves you investigating which sites are targeting the same key phrase, what they do well and where you can beat them.

When I look at the search results for “estate agents leeds” immediately alarm bells ring. Mannington Stainton sit at the top for this result and straight away I am thinking “is this down to Google’s brand emphasis”? If so it is going to be harder to knock off the top spot.

Let’s take a closer look at the site.

On Page

This site is in no way optimised for the keyword “estate agents leeds”, no real optimisation efforts have been made on page, with only a few variations exisiting. The only thing to note about the on page elements is that the footer is filled with internal anchored links which looks a little spammy.

Off Page

197 links pointing to the site passing average link juice, none of which are anchored with the keyword. I think this ranking is definitley the result of branding, but let’s work with it anyway. On the face of it, this site should be knocked off the top spot pretty easily.

When conducting competitive analysis, you should be looking at the types and quality of links, also the amount of links, on page optimisation efforts, content structure and internal linking structure, just to name a few. All these will help you focus your own campaign.

On Page Changes

OK let’s look at Morfitt Shaw to see what changes we should make on page and some suggestions about optimising content.

The obvious elements are the title tag, meta tags, headings, alt attributes, body content and bold keywords. All small things but ones that make an overall difference.

Morfitt’s is pretty poorly optimised on page and it is a surprise it is ranking so high.

- The title tag is spammy and needs chaning to look more professional. I personally like to use 2 to 3 keywords seperated by the hyphen (-). I would personally change the title tag to:

Estate Agents Leeds – Leeds Letting Agency – Morfitt Shaw Estate Agency

This is just preference but keyword stuffing is always going to have a detrimental effect.

- Meta description is ok but I like to use the keyword variation twice.

- The headings and alt attributes need to be used and more content needs adding to the homepage.

The following are some possible suggestions:-

More Content

The homepage needs more content, 400 – 600 words describing the business, the location and the services broadly. The keyword should be implemented at least 5 – 9 times. Bolding the keyword once can also be effective.

Get a blog

A blog is needed to add relevant and up to date content to the domain, this will help ranking power and allow the targeting of longtail keywords. Every business needs a blog.

Off Page Changes

The things we focus on off page are relevance, popularity, authority and anchor text. Morfitt’s needs work on all of it.

- Article marketing to increase link popularity and anchor text
- Local business directories to increase relevance and authority
- Offer career services in order to get links from .gov or .edu domains
- Use new blog to create relevant internal links pointing to your homepage

Morfitt’s really needs some quality link partners as only a handful of the links pass juice and have relevant anchors.

It took me 30mins to find the following:-

- freeindex directory (good for authority)
- agentquote.co.uk (good for authority, relevance)
- rooftoplets.com (good for relevance)
- touchleeds.com (authority and relevance)

A days link scouting and you should be able to find 100 with the right tools.

Crawling Issues

This is fundamental to SEO, your site must be crawlable and free from anomolies that can lead to Google penalties.

Duplicate title, meta data and urls are the most common, but broken links and redirects also effect rankings.

Morfitt’s needs canonicalisation work on the homepage due to multiple urls and also should consider using Google webmaster tools to set a preferential url. Apart from this the site is pretty clean.

This was a very basic analysis of how to run through an SEO campaign but it is a question I get a lot of emails about. A fully paid campaign involves a more indepth analysis and obvious link building assistance as well as consulting, but following this model should keep you on the right track. So to sum up:-

• Keyword Research – Focusing on relevance and competition
• Competition Analyisis – Looking for holes in op and off page optimisation
• On Page Optimisation – Ensure you have the relevant areas optimised naturally.
• Off page optimisation – Think authority, relevance, link juice and anchor text
• Crawlability – Duplicate tags, content, broken link and redirects

Hope you enjoyed

Tim

I thought I would take a little time today discussing keyword research, I have discussed some aspects of this subject before in “Think Like a Buyer” but want to go into more detail for this post.

Keyword research is a crucial part of SEO, especially before developing your new site but also when looking to add new content and target new terms. What I want to do is give you a 4 step process to go through to help you find the right keywords and eliminate to wrong ones.

Step 1 – Getting The Relevant Keywords.

The start to all good keyword research is getting a long list of relevant keywords together ready to be wittled down to your super focused keywords. I love using the Google Keyword Tool for this. I have tried lot’s of other keyword tools some paid and some not, but none of them offer more than what you can get with Google’s Tool.

All you need to do here is type in some keywords that are “broadly” related to your content. Type in as many as you like and from the lists that appear add all the relevant ones to you basket. At this stage use the advice in my think like a buyer article, try and input the keywords you think your customers are most likely to use. Put youself in their shoes, what keyword would you type in to search for your product?

I normally compile lists of over 100 keywords, once you are done it is time to start narrowing these terms down.

Step 2 – Understanding Intention.

Even though a keyword may relate to your product/service, it may not be the most profitable one to optimise for. No one knows exactly which ones are going to be profitable for certain, but there are certain things we can do to increase our chances.

Navigational Keywords

These keywords belong to the searchers who are looking for a specific product or service. For example a search for “Disneyland”. The searchers who type this in are more than likely looking for the Disney sites, you see many searchers don’t use bookmarks or RSS, they simply type the brand into the search bar.

If you have a well known brand you need to optimise and make sure your at number one for your brand name as these keywords will be ultra profitable.

If you do not have a brand but another brand is closely linked or very similar to your product or service, these type of keywords will normally result in a poor ROI. Even if you rank high, searchers are probably going to overlook your site in favour of the better known product.

A very small percentage of your keywords will be navigational ones.

Transactional Keywords

These keywords are the ones searchers are going to use to buy your product or service.

“buy a used car”
“cheap flights to madrid”

These searchers are potentially wanting to make a purchase or are at least ready to be sold to. They are usually very profitable keywords with high ROI if you have a site that sells.

Informational Keywords

Informational keywords will make up the bulk of your keyword list. These searchers are simply looking for qaulity information on a specific subject. Most bloggers will rank highly for informational keywords as they are developed to provide searchers with free, high qaulity information.

The down side to these type of keywords is the fact that they tend not to convert very well, usually around 1 in 100 – 200. They still cannot be ignored as this free informational traffic will help build brand awareness and reputation.

Sort all your keywords into the above categories, as I said 70-80% will be in the informational list.

Step 3 – Some Deep Thinking.

Now comes the time to ask yourself some questions about your product or service.

What am I really offering?

What is the end result for the customer?

Time to cut out the rubbish, narrow down your keywords in the 3 lists until they are as focused as possible. Try to avoid the keywords that aren’t fully relevant to your product/service, for example:-

If your site sells dog training lessons, the keyword “dog products” is probably going to be too broad to bring in profitable traffic with most bouncing on the first page.

Take into account the location you are targeting and how to intergrate the area name into your keywords.

I know I have said it before but think like the buyer.

Step 4 – Content Integration.

Now you should have 3 lists of keywords as focused as possible. Time to implement them into your content.

First start by splitting the keywords into high traffic and low traffic. If there are under 500 search’s a month they will be low traffic. Anything over this put in the high traffic section.

How many pages are there going to be on your main site? Not your blog, but the main selling platform. You need to optimise each of these pages for one of your high traffic keywords, using it in the usual online optimisation areas. Don’t just use the exact keyword but use multiple variations.

The lower traffic keywords need to be used in your main content and in your blog, use them wherever it is natural to do so, but remember your traffic keywords need the main focus as this will bring in the most customers and increase your ability to rank for relevant variations.

Using the above method should help you narrow down and implment those all important, high profit keywords.

Thanks

Tim