Last time, in ‘A work in progress’, we discussed the greater sophistication of internet users and the need to cater for longer keyword phrases. Now, let’s see how we as web site owners should be responding to the challenge.
The three word keyword phrase is just one of the symptoms of the wider acceptance and use of the internet in our daily lives. As the number of web pages and web users has grown dynamically in the last ten years, so, too, has the need for search terms and search results to become more focussed. To aid this quality over quantity tenet, web owners are responding by making their content as contextual and relevant as possible.
In part this means identifying the ‘long tail phrases’ used by our traffic and building pages to suit. Primary keywords obviously come first in the grand page-building scheme of things, then pages for niche keyword phrases and finally the ‘long tails’. Unless there’s a major shift in user behaviour this will remain the case; the important point being that we acknowledge that longer keyword search terms still score us traffic and shouldn’t be ignored.
Broadly speaking, the received wisdom is that human nature being what it is, users will, like water, follow the path of least resistance. Targeting one word or two word keywords makes sense up to a point. Evidence from web site analytics clearly demonstrates that more and more people are using longer phrases, have a good idea what they are looking for (which is a big help) and convert to paying customers at a significantly higher rate than other casual web site traffic.
It is all neatly proportional: as the number of web pages goes up so does the word length of keyword phrase, the searching ability of web users and the number of opportunities to search on a smaller and more localised basis.
The bottom line for those at the digital coalface of ecommerce is vigilance, close monitoring of keyword performance and well thought out content that hits all the search engine sweet spots. On site this translates as additional pages or possibly, in some cases, micro-sites that target key phrases containing three or more words. These key phrases should not only appear in navigation and page titles, but also within the body of the content on the page.
The trick, of course, is being aware of what these key search terms are in the first place. Fortunately for small to micro-sized companies this does not necessarily involve parting with large wedges of cash. It can be done for free if you don’t count the time, energy and brainpower.
Firstly, no single tool that can be accessed for free, or as a free trial, will provide sight of the big picture. A number of tools are used and the results aggregated to, hopefully, make sense of the disparate data and reveal a pattern.
Try out some of the following, collating the results into a spreadsheet if you wish. (Personally, I’m not a big fan of spreadsheets. In part this is due to having my mind blown when someone showed me how they used Excel to edit text and manage web site content. Until then it had never even occurred to me to put anything other than numbers into a spreadsheet.)
Yahoo! Overture Keyword Tool - Time was this free tool returned keyword counts for the previous month. At the moment, it seems to be stuck on January 2007 for freeloaders. What it does is provide raw data on the popularity of keywords, displaying the number of times each phrase has been searched for.
Google Trends - Compare the world's interest in your favourite keyword. Enter up to five and see how often they've been searched on Google, appeared in Google News stories and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most. ‘Today’s Hot Trends’ displays an hourly snapshot of the top 100 fastest rising search queries in the US.
Google Monitor - Another great free tool. This enables users to enter their site’s keywords and measure how successful each is in terms of searches. It is also possible to rank your site against that of rivals for keyword comparison purposes.
WordTracker - Despite the US-style spelling on the site, WordTracker is a UK-based operation that will help you identify and optimise your keyword selection from a database of results and data collected from the major metacrawlers, Dogpile and Metacrawler. A free trial is available. Normal price is £29 per month, but weekly subscriptions can be had for £15.
KeywordDiscovery - Offers a free trial to try out its keyword search statistics from over 180 search engines world wide and the ability to research language specific keyword databases sourced from regional search engines and users from those regions, including the US, Australia, Europe and the UK. The company claims to possess the largest keyword database with over 36 billion searches. Subscription services start from $49.99 (£25) per month.
Google AdWords keyword tool selector - No need to sign up for AdWords to use this tool. Be warned, however, it’s not the most intuitive, nor the fastest, of tools created. Instead of numbers, bars indicate popularity, which isn’t really ideal for fine-tuning. On the plus side, users are able to find keywords related to the content on linked pages within a site and examine their popularity.
SpyFu - A free tool that is somewhat off-putting for the novice as it includes a lot of detail and costings for AdWord campaigns. Handy for researching related terms, the popularity of longer multi-word search phrases and who tops the search engines on a particular term. A subscription allows access to the full database. The monthly fee starts at $38.50 (£19) while a three-day pass costs $6.75 (£3.35).
HitTail - Described by Business Week as “one of the most innovative ideas of 2006”, HitTail reveals in real time which keywords people use to find your web site and offers keywords suggestions based on your site traffic. A snippet of Java code must be added to each page to enable tracking of your site. HitTail Basic is free, while the Plus version retails from $9.95 (£5) per month.
