Keyword Research Follow-up with Christine Churchill

Q: What tools do you recommend for keyword research?

• A: Just as you would get a second opinion from a doctor, I like to use multiple sources for keyword information.The tools I’m using most frequently these days are Keyword Discovery and the new enhanced Google Keyword tool with its seasonal information. Other tools I use are Nichebot, Yahoo Suggestion Tool and WordTracker.That said, I would caution anyone to be careful to not rely solely on keyword tools. All of them have inflated numbers. I would strongly recommend anyone doing keyword research to talk directly with the target audience. Finding the terminology they use to describe products is important to speaking the language of the customer.
   
  We have some in-house tools that take a lot of the “grunt” work out of keyword research – those save me tons of time and automatically lay out the data I need to properly evaluate keywords. Also, don’t forget that good old Excel is still a great tool for sorting and manipulating long keyword lists.  

Q: If you were in the hospital who would you want to do your keyword research?

• A: Yikes, please don’t wish that on me….However, if I were to fall off my horse and need to go to the hospital, I would want someone on my internal team to do my keyword research. We have an in-house process that looks at keywords from a variety of angles. We start with popularity and relevancy, but we also consider the competitive landscape associated with the keyword and the site we are selecting a keyword for. In fact this is an area that is overlooked by many when they evaluate keywords. They look at the popularity numbers and stop there, when really there are other factors that affect the appropriateness of a keyword. You have different keywords that might be appropriate for PPC, but the site can’t compete in SEO on that term – at least not until a lot more work has been done on the site to build up its “worthiness” to rank for the term.User intent is another consideration in keyword selection. For example, a searcher typing in “car reviews” may be early in the buying process – he may be simply doing early research on what cars are rated well in different categories. A searcher typing in “fast car loans” may be highly motivated to buy a car immediately for use on a hot date Saturday night. I find the best people to do the keyword selection process is someone who has been in the SEO business a while. It takes time to cultivate an eye for keywords. Even when you have tons of data in front of you, sometimes the final decision on keyword selection is a gut feel – a subjective decision. The more experience you have in this area, the better you get at it. The problem is with optimization, if you are competing on competitive terms, you can’t target every term you want. Your focus has to be very narrow and that means you may have to chose between very good terms. It’s on those hard decisions where it takes a practiced eye to make a good decision. I want to mention one other recommendation about doing keyword research and that is to use speakers native to the country you are targeting. If you are targeting France, then use native French speakers in France, not Canadian French speakers (and vice versa). Same with any other language. The expressions and colloquial speech are different. I carry this same philosophy to the US. If you are targeting the US, use English speakers from the US. Similarly, when targeting the UK, use British natives, not those pesky Americans . A trend I find disturbing is for large SEM shops to outsource their US keyword research overseas. The folks overseas may be taught English – heck, they may be able to speak it more properly than most in the US, but they will miss the language nuances that only a native speaker resident in the country would be aware of. I see this trend to outsource US keyword research overseas as a serious mistake. It is the worst step in the SEM process to outsource overseas. Keyword selection is the fundamental step in a multi-step process. Mess up in your keyword selection and every step after is flawed. 

Q: How often should people work on their keyword research?

• If you are monitoring site performance closely then you are really dong keyword selection constantly. We identify our measures of success up front and then we track which terms bring visitors that “convert.” Convert can mean different things to different sites – buying a product, making a donation if its a non-profit, downloading a white page, or it could something as simple as time on site and number of pages viewed. Also, we review the logs for terms visitors are using to find the site. Since language is not static, but rather evolves and changes as new expressions work their way into the vocabulary of the everyday person, we look for ways to capture that information. Blogs, forum boards, opinion sites are great ways to get insight into how people describe products and companies. My favorite way to get new keywords is to talk with the tech support people who talk directly with the customers. Often they know better than anyone else in the company the language of the customer. That knowledge is like gold to a keyword oriented marketer.

Q: Where can people read more of your words of wisdom?

• I have several articles on the web on keyword selection. Here are a couple that can give you a taste for my keyword philosophy.
  http://www.keyrelevance.com/articles/brainkeyw.htm
  http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol6/promo_no2.htm 
  You can also hear me talk about keyword research at Search Engine Strategies. I speak at both the Basic and Advanced sessions of keyword research at SES. Feel free to come talk with me about keyword techniques. I’m always open to new ideas and tools. It’s a subject I’m passionate about.