E-Commerce Technology Florida: Internet Marketing Benefits Article 2

Keyword Analysis Tool

The #1 must have keyword analysis tool available today is called WordTracker. Click here to get started using this indispensible tool right away!

The Importance of Choosing Keywords That Pull

Keyword research is one of the most important areas to consider in trying to increase your internet sales. If you disagree with this statement, or do not know what the acronym KEI stands for, you may be missing out on valuable opportunities to drive targeted traffic to your site - traffic that is likely to convert to sales. Worse yet, if you believe that listing all keywords and their variations related to your business in your "keywords" meta-tag and getting listed with many search engines and directories is enough, what you actually have is a goldmine of potential sales that you have not even started to tap yet!

To show how important keyword research is in affecting the volume of sales on your site, we can walk through an example. Suppose your site sells cell phones, then isn't "cell phones" the obvious keyword phrase to use? Let's look at this particular search term as an example. According to WordTracker, a popular keyword analysis tool, at the time of this writing, over 7,000 searches were run for this keyword phrase over a 30 day period. That's a lot of searches! Even a portion of all this traffic to your site would be great - and since you registered with the search engines and major directories, you will see a lot of that traffic, right? Wrong! It is possible you may not get any traffic at all, and here's why. To use the search engine Google as an example, when you type your keyword phrase "cell phones" into Google, it displays the first 10 results of about 2,980,000. So your page with the keyword "cell phones" is competing against about 3 million other pages on this same keyword. The fact that you registered with the search engines and directories means (and we are assuming for this example that Google has indexed your page) that your page is definitely one of those 3 million pages!

Given that Google displays 10 results per page and that most users will not sift through more than 3-4 pages of results, this means that to get any traffic to your site you need to rank in at least the top 30-40 listings of the 3 million. How do you do that? By optimizing your page for this keyword phrase until it ranks that high. Exactly how to do that is another topic as it can get very complicated - there are many companies who specialize in providing search engine optimization (SEO) services to help your pages rank high enough to get traffic to your site. And once you really go through this optimization process you will also realize that you can only optimize a single web page for just 1 or maybe 2 keyword phrases. Since "cell phones" is a very popular and highly competitive phrase it will take even a seasoned SEO company to get your page to come out in the top 30 listings.

However, there is another approach you can take - reconsider the keyword phrase you want to optimize on. What would happen if you could use a more descriptive phrase that better describes your product - the total number of searches on this phrase would be lower than that of your more general phrase, but there would also be less competitors optimizing on this more specific phrase too. If you could achieve a top ranking for this more specific keyword phrase, then customers coming to your site would be better qualified and more highly targeted, which would result in a higher sales conversion rate. So you zero in on less but more targeted traffic that fewer of your competitors are zeroing in on. Let's say you are actually selling Nokia cell phones, do you really even want all the traffic for the keyword phrase "cell phones"? Using Google, if you search on the more specific keyword phrase "Nokia cell phones", there are now only 300,000 other pages using this keyword phrase. This makes it easier to achieve a top ranking too!

And what if there are other search terms being used in the search engines that you haven't even thought of? You need to know what keywords your target market is typing into the search engines, rather than guessing at what you believe your keywords are. By understanding what your customer is doing online you may gain some insight into a new angle you can put on your site or page that your competitors haven't even thought of yet! A good example of this is with an online store that sells baby furniture. After analyzing what this target market was doing online, the store owner realized that his potential customers were running searches for the phrase "baby names". He changed his site to provide valuable information on baby names and optimized his pages for the keyword phrase "baby names". Once the traffic was at his site, he could "cross-sell" his own products to these people, and has had tremendous success in doing so.

The real trick in performing keyword analysis is to find search terms that have a high Keyword Effectiveness Index, or KEI. This term was invented by Sumantra Roy, a respected Search Engine Positioning specialist. The KEI is a measure of how effective a particular keyword is for your page. The KEI takes into account a keywords popularity and the amount of competition, or other web sites, already using the term. A higher KEI means that the keyword is more popular and has less competition than a KEI that is lower. If you can find a search term relevant to your site that has a KEI from 100 and up, your chances of being able to optimize your site and achieve a top ranking for this keyword are very good. In fact, the higher the KEI, the less optimization work you will have to do to achieve a top ranking for that keyword.

In the baby names example above, the KEI for Google for baby furniture was 177 - not bad - but the KEI for baby names was a staggering 3958! This store owner optimized on baby names knowing that his target market would search on this related term, and was able to take advantage of the higher KEI that many of his competitors were missing to be able to sell his products.

Keyword research is still important as the trend toward pay-per-click (PPC) services increases. Here, the merchant pays a preset bid amount each time a customer clicks through to their site. This might seem to be an easier way to get traffic to your site, however, knowing which of your keywords has the highest KEI will help you in this scenario too. In our original example, if you wanted to bid on the more general term "cell phones", as of this writing using Overture's PPC services, you would need to bid 53 cents per click to rank at #10 and $1.12 to rank #1. But now that you are paying by the click, you will receive lots of traffic interested in types of cell phones that you do not sell. This traffic will not convert to sales and will eat through your entire budget very quickly. If you use the more targeted phrase "Nokia cell phones", as of this writing using Overture's PPC services you would pay 22 cents to rank at #10, and 61 cents to rank #1. So, your PPC cost is lower and you will be driving more targeted traffic to your site, which is more likely to convert to sales. For the baby names example, not many people even bid on this term - as of this writing you could bid as low as 1 cent per click (if it were possible, Overture has a minimum bid of 10 cents per click) to get position #5 but using the term baby furniture you would need to bid 19 cents per click to rank at #5! Overture also estimates the level of traffic searching on baby names in a 30 day period to be 39,289, as compared with 3,486 for the phrase baby furniture! If you can find a relevant keyword phrase with a high KEI using the PPC model, you can drive relevant traffic to your site for a lower cost per click than your competitors for the more general keyword clicks.

As important as keyword research is in increasing your internet sales, it is an ongoing task, as keyword phrases, KEI levels, and on-line consumer behavior are constantly changing. Keyword analysis coupled with good optimization of your best keyword phrases will result in driving the most targeted traffic to your site. However once these visitors reach your site you still have to be able to entice them to buy, and ideally to come back to your site again and again. Our next article will discuss the importance of tracking how visitors got to your site and and what they did once they reached your site. This information is vital for knowing how to tune your site to increase your sales conversion rate.