Guessing at your keywords is no more accurate than what would be expected purely by chance. And even seasoned search engine optimisers struggle to do any better without the help of database technology.
Keyword research company, Wordtracker took their ‘Keyword Challenge’ game to search engine and web conferences in New York, London, Las Vegas and Chicago, and asked attendees to guess between pairs of randomly generated keywords.
In the game, players are presented with a series of screens, each of which shows two keywords from a specific market sector. They then have to guess which is the most popular. Wordtracker found that even experienced search engine optimisers guessed wrong 45 per cent of the time.
To ensure that players were motivated to win, they gave away a highly prized video iPod each day to the player who scored the highest in the shortest period of time. From recorded scores of over two thousand players, many of whom were experienced search engine optimisers, the percentage correct were little better that you would expect from chance – just 54.9% correct overall.
The pairs of keywords were drawn from fifteen topics and players scored best on ‘web related’ keywords (59.1% correct) and ‘food related’ keywords (59.0 % correct). They scored worst on ‘fashion related’ keywords (49.1% correct) and ‘family related’ keywords (50.6% correct).
“This might be fine in a game,” says Andy Mindel, CEO of Wordtracker, “but if you relied on such guesses in your online business, you’d be losing substantial amounts of sales.”
“Most people’s starting point on the web is a search engine and so it is crucial that your web site comes high in the results,” says Mindel, “and the key to that is to use the best keywords in your web site copy.”
Of course, the results of the ‘Keyword Challenge’ may say more about those who took part and the keywords selected in the game, but it is illuminating just the same. For getting the keywords right is essential for any web site, probably more so for small to micro-sized companies in a crowded marketplace or who operate in a specific geographic area.
As previously reported, Wordtracker are currently offering a free trial, but web site owners ought to try out Yahoo! Search Marketing’s Keyword Assistant too for comparison. The latter one is not UK-centric like Wordtracker but useful if your marketplace is more international or US-based.
Also worth downloading is the keyword tracking software Free Monitor for Google that lets users see how their results ranking for particular keywords. (The free version is quite far down the page, so you’ll need to scroll to get there.)
