The first step in any SEO project is to establish which keywords/phrases we should pursue rankings for. For some clients, the question is an easy enough one to answer - I sell blue widgets, so I want to rank for ‘blue widgets’, ‘buy blue widgets’, cheap blue widgets’ and so on; but in most cases it’s somewhat more complex.
A typical ‘old school’ SEO keyword research technique would be to simply divide the volume of searches for the keyword by the amount of websites ‘competing’ for the search query, and find the keyword with the most favourable popularity/competition ratio. Whilst volume and competition should of course form part of the keyword research process, this approach can be a little too simplistic.
As such, we typically consider the following factors when selecting keywords for our clients:
Relevance (and what converts!)
Before we even start looking at search volumes and competing websites we need to fully understand what kind of keywords would be relevant to our client – typically this involves looking at all the products/services offered and working out what a searcher might use to find the service/product in question.
The temptation here is to go too broad with keywords, if you sell golf lessons, you’re probably likely to find that your best converting traffic comes from keywords like ’golf lessons’, or ‘golf lessons in <location>’. You might *want* to rank for ‘golf’ but unless you’ve a huge budget and have little or no concerns about seeing ROI from your activity, this probably isn’t the best choice of keyword.
If you’ve run PPC campaigns before, you should already have a goldmine of information to give you a good idea of which phrases are most relevant, and convert. If you’ve no such data, and poor rankings currently, it may be worth running a PPC campaign to test which keywords/phrases convert.
Commercial Value
This ultimately relies on having a clear understanding of the client’s business model – many businesses either sell multiple products, or have multiple propositions for various customer subsets e.g. for a site selling blue widgets – the keyword ‘luxury blue widgets’ might bring in higher margin business whereas ‘cheap blue widgets’ will deliver volume.
Volume
Once you’ve got an idea of what keywords might be feasible to target, the next thing you’ll want to consider is how many people are searching on the different variations – obviously more searches mean the potential for traffic is higher. Different variations can have surprisingly different search volumes even when the meaning is the same. For example, if you compare “caravan insurance” to “insurance for caravan” – 2 phrases which broadly mean the same thing – the search volumes are radically different.
Trends
Don’t overlook trends either – Google Trends is the most obvious source for information here, it’s not necessarily about only targeting keywords which are increasing in popularity but targeting a keyword in the descendance might not be the best use of time and resource.
Competition
Perhaps one of the most important considerations – we basically consider this from 2 points of view:
- What can be achieved for the budget available
- What niches are being under-served
The budget , if known, will determine the absolute ceiling, while the keywords with low competition (yet reasonable volume and relevance) may represent easy wins. Assessing keyword competition can be tricky rather than relying on a purely arithmetic approach here we tend to look at several factors:
- Strength of top sites (mozrank & domain mozrank of top websites)
- What type of pages are ranking (homepage, powerful subpages or weak subpages)
- Competing pages (allintitle search for the phrase in question)
- Strength of sites at bottom of page one
There are more things that can be done (especially if the decision might require a high investment with a long payback), such as looking at whether the websites ranking have optimised anchor text or not, but it’s not always feasible to do this for every keyword.
Putting it all together
Good keyword research isn’t easy, it requires detailed thought and attention to get right, and when you have hundreds of potential keywords and many factors to consider it’s advisable to get the data into a format where you can make sense of it. There are many approaches but a balanced scorecard is probably the most obvious. An example might be as follows:
Your weightings will obviously depend on your clients priorities, and the data here is purely fictional, but hopefully it should give you an idea; in this case ‘Luxury Blue Widgets’ and ‘Dark Blue Widgets’ both look attractive, but given the competition differences it may be a wise strategy to target both ‘Blue Widgets’ and ‘Luxury Blue Widgets’ on the same page.
Even after you’ve done all of this work, it’s often just the start – combining primary keywords for pages (and secondary keywords you are able to pickup) will often follow this stage, as well as working out how to pickup mid/long tail variations of the keyword.
The one thing for sure though, is that if you spend the time to get this right from the start, you will be far more likely to see your efforts pay off….
I’m often asked at what point I decide to pause a keyword in a PPC campaign. The truth is that when asked anything about PPC my response is always “it depends”.
Deleting Large Numbers of Comments from your Blog
January 15th, 2010Every New Year inevitably brings reflections, resolutions, and commitments to self improvement. One of my biggest faults, is that I will generally put off jobs I don’t want to do until I can’t put them off any more. This fault was highlighted to me when I caught a glimpse of comments awaiting moderation for my blog… 3476!
“How did I let it get this far?? How long is it going to take to moderate all these comments, of which 99.9% are likely to be robots from an ‘extension’ company offering ways to improve performance in the ‘evening time’! Is there not a remove all button?”… These and many more questions ran through my mind as I desperately looked for ways to avoid manually deleting the comments 20 at a time!
If you’re wondering if there is a button to press on WordPress that mass removes all comments, the short answer is not at this time. However, I did mange to get rid of all the comments without having to do them 20 at a time. Here’s how I did it… (To do this you will need access to the cpanel where your blog resides.)
Firstly it is always a good idea to back up your blog before you do any fiddling with it. If you don’t know how to do this you can find instructions here on the WordPress site
1. Once you have backed up your blog, go into PHP My Admin in your hosting’s Cpanel.
2. In PHP My Admin, to the left, you will see the blog database listed, click on it and a list of tables within the database will appear.
3. Now all you need to do is click on the tab ‘ SQL ‘ which is in the menu to the right in the main section. Clicking this will open the SQL command input area in which you should copy and paste the following command:
DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = '0'That’s it, if you log back into your blog you will see that all the comments awaiting approval will have been deleted.
The slate is wiped clean and you can promise yourself you will make a concerted effort to approve comments on a more regular basis henceforth
Tags: Blog, Blogging, Comment Spam
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