Keyword Selection: Less Is More
Scope out the webmaster sites and industry hubs and you’ll find a lot of content on the importance of keyword selection. Okay, assuming you know nothing about keyword selection, let’s start at the beginning.
What Are Keywords?
They’re the words entered by search engine users looking for specific information on a topic, service or product. For example, if you were looking to buy a digital camera online you’d most likely go to Google, Yahoo, Ask or any number of other search engines, type ‘digital cameras’ into the search box and receive the results on the search engine results pages or SERPs.
Keywords are also used by search engines to classify your site according to top secret, highly-classified keyword taxonomies. A taxonomy is simply a sorting system. For example, all living things are sorted by kingdom, phylum, genus, species, etc. Same with keywords.
If, as a site owner, you selected ‘digital cameras’ as one of your site’s keywords and included this phrase in your site’s keyword tag, a search engine spider, after making a few checks of the actual text of your site, would classify, or index, your site as one that sold digital cameras. So when search engine users enter ‘digitalcameras’ as a search query, your site will show up on the SERPs. Somewhere.
How to Beat the Competition Using Lower-Ranked Keywords
So here’s the thing. If you sell digital cameras (since that’s what we’re using as our example) you’d naturally choose ‘digital cameras’ as a keyword, right? It’s a natural. Problem is, every other online electronics outlet that sells digital cameras will use those same keywords: ‘digital cameras’. And what does this mean to you?
When a search engine user queries ‘digital cameras’ onGoogle, your site may well end up on page 1320 of Google’s SERPs. And when was the last time you searched through 1320 SERPs looking for anything! In essence, using the keywords ‘digital cameras’ makes you all but invisible to search engine users, i.e., you won’t see any organic (naturally generarted) search-engine-driven site traffic.
But what if your keyword list was comprised of lesser-used keywords and phrases? Well, for one thing you’d still see fewer organic visitors because you’re using lesser employed keywords. However, search engine users often don’t go with the number one or two keyword. Sometimes they go with out-of-left-field keywords based on language differences, education level, current slang and a host of other factors.
As a site owner, you can easily find the most popular keywords for your products or services. You can take them directly from the top ranked sites by viewing the metadata of leading websites using Internet Explorer’s source view, so there are no secrets.
You can also find pricey keyword generators and
Or go ask Google yourself. The Google keyword generator at Google's Webmaster Central provides real user queries entered within the past 30 days. Real users. Real keywords.
However, using the most popular keywords isn’t going to do much in generating organic results. For example, on the day of this writing, here are the number of hits generated by Google using variations of the digital camera theme.
Google Hits By Keyword or Phrase
digital cameras = 87,200,000 hits
digital photography = 118,000,000
digital photography equipment = 39,500,000
digital photography cameras = 55,000,000
cheap digital cameras = 21,900,000
really cheap digital cameras = 10,100,000
digital camera prices catalog = 1,750,000
really cheap digital camera catalog = 876,000
‘Digital photography’, as a keyword phrase, generates 118 million hits! Where’s your site in that dog pile? On the other hand, the keyword phrase ‘really cheap digital camera catalog’ generates less than 1 million hits (876K on this day). Get the point?
Sure, a whole lot fewer search engine users will enter ‘really cheap digital camera catalog’ than just plain old ‘digital cameras’ but the dog pile is a whole lot smaller, too.
Just look at the keyword phrases above. The difference between the keyword phrases ‘digital photography’ and ‘digital photography equipment’ is 78,500,000 search engine hits. You’ve just eliminated 78 million competitors simply by adding the word ‘equipment’ to your keyword phrase list.
But smart keyword selection doesn’t end there.
Google AdWords – Saving Money Is EasySite owners who use AdWords bid on Google keywords and phrases based on the popularity of those words and phrases. So, you, the site owner, might pay 75 cents per click-through for top-most placement on the AdWords stack found on SERP #1 generated when the search engine user queries ‘digital photography’. (Actually, it’ll probably be more!) However, if you bid on ‘digital photography equipment’, the less popular keyword phrase, you might only have to pay 25 or 30 cents per click. And since you only pay by the click (in other words no click no pay) this is a great way to stretch your marketing dollars.
Bid on less popular keywords and phrases (even misspelled keyword phrases, e.g. digital photography quipment; note the missing 'e' in equipment) and you’ll stretch those promo dollars to the max, even if it takes longer for enough search engine users to enter your selected keywords.
All Keywords Are Not Created Equal
Thankfully.
You can cut the competition by 90% simply by selecting lesspopular keywords. Using the most popular words and phrases puts you in head-to-head competition with the most popular competitor sites. Opting for less frequently-used keywords cuts the competition down to size and saves you PPC costs.
So, don’t go with the top ranked keywords if you’re not a top-ranked site. Build organic search engine results through the use of lesser-used keywords. In the web wars for commercial supremacy, less really is more.
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