Don’t fall for the myth of keywords…

Here is something to think about when you are doing keyword
research.

Anyone who has dabbled in Internet marketing knows that keyword
research is fundamental to what we do. You find your niche and
then you find what people are searching for within that niche.

If you find a keyword (the term keyword can mean just one word,
or an entire phrase, so don’t be confused by it) that has a lot
of people searching for it, and at the same time you find that
the same keyword has relatively few web pages serving it, then
conventional wisdom says you have a winner!

Just go off, build a decent page for that keyword, get lots of
backlinks pointing to it and hey presto, Google will sent you
oodles of free traffic.

It isn’t really that simple, of course.

Yes, the principle is fine in theory. Follow the simple rules and
you will get free traffic from Google and the other search
engines. But not all traffic is created equal.

If it turns out that most of that traffic is window shopping, the
chances of you making a sale to it is slim.

Even worse, if your niche attracts a lot of freebie seekers, then
your chance of making money is even less than slim.

10,000 visitors to your website per day may count for absolutely
nothing if your keyword is too general, too vague, too generic,
or too often used by people who have no intention of buying.

“Digital camera” gets 30,000,000 searches a month. If by some
chance you could get on page one of Google for that keyword,
you’d get a mass of traffic. So much that your bandwidth
allocation had better be unlimited! But how many of those people
are in a buying mood? I’d bet that hardly any are really in the
market to spend any money – yet.

The work you’d have to put in to rank for that keyword would,
largely, be wasted.

Consider though, the keyword “buy digital camera”. Just one more
word reduces the monthly search volume to 135,000. Now they have
told you that they are interested in buying. Your selling job
just got a lot easier. But what kind of digital camera do they
want to buy?

We have made the keyword more relevant to people who want to
spend money, but we’ve still left ourselves a big job to convert
them to buy the specific camera we might be selling. What if we
are selling a Nikon and they are really looking for a Canon?

The answer is to make our keyword even more specific. How about
“buy nikon coolpix”? ‘Only’ 12,100 searches per month, but this
time they are searches by people who are already at the point of
purchase.

And that is the key to effective marketing and effective keyword
research.

We often hear about long tail keywords. Usually that is simply
taken to mean four or five word phrases that don’t get many
searches, but put lots of them together and you have a decent
monthly volume. The trouble is, long tail keywords are no more
likely to include potential customers than any other shorter
keyphrases – unless they include the magic trigger words that
searchers who are ready to buy use.

Words like buy, best price, review, purchase, deals, offers,
sale, specials, discount and cheap. And if it applies to your
market, include the serial numbers too as someone searching for a
specific model number has normally done their comparison shopping
and is now ready to buy.

Don’t fall for the myth of keywords. Broad keywords result in
lots of hard work, general, untargeted traffic and empty pockets.

Keywords that are focused on people at the point of purchase are
gold dust. And luckily for us, very few people are effectively
targeting them.

But Kickstarters know better, don’t we?

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