Are you getting the most out of your keywords? Here are some opportunities that even slip the eye of professionals.
This far down the road in SEO anyone would be a fool to understate the importance of getting keywords right, and to be honest, most agencies do. But getting something right and excelling at it are two very different things. Even some of the most grizzled SEO veterans miss some pretty good opportunities though, and it’s probably because they are sitting right under everybody’s noses.
As we come into the New Year with the best annual intensions for our ranking goals, why not take this opportunity to spot the beats we have been missing; because there are tons of keyword opportunities right in front of us that we should start taking advantage of now to help us learn more about digital marketing, even if we think we already know everything. And in the spirit of new endeavours, you’ll be happy to know that none of this points to any tasks that are particularly difficult or time consuming, it’s more about taking a bit of a closer look at your content, and exploiting what you see there.
What we’ll be talking about here is sifting through and analysing your existing site search, making use of words you are already ranking for, and using the right tools to help you do it.
Look into your existing site search
What better way to find useful keywords than by checking what people who are visiting your site have been searching for. You would be surprised what phrases come up, long-tailed treasures which you would otherwise have never thought to use. Together with some tools, youcan analyse and rectify your keyword usage based on your website’s search history that you may have missed.
Your sites internal search queries can give you tons of new long tail keywords to utilise, and mostly they will start with question words like ‘how’, ‘why’, and ‘when’. In some cases this technique has generated around 27,000 possible questions from 600,000 queries. There is a lot of room for keyword usage in that. Taking advantage of that can help you even avoid the kind of mistakes that even experts miss. You can analyse this with the tool of your choice, or use Google analytics to find out which phrases are coming up the most frequently, and optimizing your site accordingly.
There is another advantage to doing this. It can also give you an idea of how easy it is to find content on your site. Each query means that for one reason or another, the potential customer couldn’t find what they were looking for, so you can use it as a roadmap marker of how you can improve your site’s user experience, and optimize it for ranking.
With the right tools, mining your site’s search index and applying your findings to your optimization strategy can be quite easy. There are plenty of very good tools available to do this like the SLI Site Champions which is an interesting gadget. Its manufacturers describe it as a ‘learning tool’. That is to say that it ‘learns’ about the most commonly used phrases in your internal site search, makes a report of them for you, and if you like, can even go into the back-end of your website and optimise it accordingly by making keyword adjustments. It isn’t free, sadly, but then not many things that are worthwhile are.
Make use of your accidentally ranking keywords
You would probably be surprised to find out how much of your already existing content is perfectly peppered with keywords you could be taking advantage of. Obviously this might not be the case with long tail phrases, but is more appropriate for the shorter, more general ones that you could be missing. Using the right tools (which I will discuss later) will reveal these to you and allow you to take advantage of them.
Often the most unlikely words or phrases could be driving traffic to your site. Some bloggers report odd words like ‘chiste’ and ‘tagged’ drawing in thousands of links without being in their keyword glossary (something that this article is now adding to). Imagine the power of anchor texting something like that, within reason of course with regards to relevance and spam, you don’t want to be penalised for getting silly about it.
As you could imagine, finding the keywords you already have that are popular, tracking it, and optimising your page around it would only be largely beneficial for your website.
Use the available tools
Having the right tools at your disposal will get things done a lot quicker. If you’re reading this, then you probably use or know of some of these already:
- The abovementioned SLI Site Champions which can be used to analyse your site’s search terms and make adjustments to your keywords accordingly.
- Backazima is an ‘advanced keyword management software’ suite that really is quite powerful. It identifies search opportunities for you and analyses various aspects of your existing ones.
- Wordstream have their own tool to manage your keyword strategies. It can help you optimise productivity by sorting, grouping and tracking your keywords, and can even offer you suggestions. It also has a 30 day trial period, which is great if you don’t want to commit to a suite that you might not like later.
- Search Metrics is a family favourite for analysing your keywords’ effectiveness. It collects competitors’ data from the content that they used to attract their customers. This information is based on transactional information, which means that these are literally the keywords that are selling.
- The Authority Labs ‘Now Provided’ tool automates the monitoring activities for your site, tracks rankings and recovers (not provided) keywords. Which makes optimising a lot easier for you.
These tools will act as though they are a fresh pair of eyes, taking in all those things that you’ve missed and taking advantage of the ones which will get you ranking highly. By automating the process, the tedious sifting is taken care of, but a word of caution is in order. As great as they are, being fully reliant on automation when it comes to keyword management might not always work in your favour. Be sure to put a bit of your own flesh into the mix to make sure that all the things that are organic about your keywords, stay that way.