Assesing which keywords to target

[fleurya]

Hi Looking for some advice:

Situation: Starting and SEO campaign for the French market. We have extensive keyword data from our adwords account as this has been running for a few months.

Questions:

1. What should we be looking out for in relations to keywords to target in the seo campaign?

2. How many keywords is it sensible to target or chase? (one person dedicated to the French seo campaign)

Thanks for your help,

Andrew

[CliXelerate]

Hi Andrew -

I've found in extensive paid / organic keyword optimization synchronization, that well-written supporting content tends to take care of the long tail pretty effectively, so for synching paid/non-paid optimization, I use the following approach:

In selecting specific paid keywords to target for improved SEO, trying to optimize for too many keywords can end up diluting your overall organic results, depending partly on site structure and site focus.  I generally look at the top-ten best performing keywords for each ad group over time - which should correspond to fairly granular / specific categories, subcategories or landing pages of a website.  Then, based upon user behavior, conversions, and average CPC, I generally most specifically optimize for the top five, then include more depending upon overall search interest, etc.  Solid SEO and high-quality, relevant supporting content for your most expensive paid keywords, should not only help support your organic results, but it should also help to keep your CPC costs down as much as possible by contributing to solid landing page Quality Scores (since QS is a factor affecting CPC).

The optimal end result is to have your website show up above the fold on search results pages for both paid and organic searches for key terms.  This is relatively easy to do for more obscure terms / long tail terms, but can be pretty challenging for extremely competitive terms / when competing with older, more established sites. This is why I'll devote more time to optimizing for the keywords / key phrases which more difficult to rank well for.

So, bottom line, I work to keep SEM costs in check and keep a site in front of customer / reader eyeballs by optimizing for the most popular, most expensive, best performing keywords / key phrases.  If 90% of traffic comes from <10% of keywords, and I can have a site rank well w/ minimal effort for the other 90% of key words / key phrases capturing traffic, then I'm going to spend the most effort on the 10% or less that bring the most traffic.  (And yes, I realize this goes against quite a bit of "optimize for the long tail" discussion - but I do a lot of SEO+SEM in synch, and targeting the long tail can become counterproductive to down right detrimental in paid search.  I find that good content will nail the long tail consistently - so it takes care of itself.)

[Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.]

Without more details about what you are doing, it is hard to get detailed. Keeping it simple....You are looking for low hanging fruit.

1.) They should be keywords that are converting/call to action keywords. If you have the adwords data and performance already then you will know what they are. But it is common sense: the example would be if you sell apples. Apple as a keyword is good. Buy apples is better.

2.) That would be keywords that have lower competition and have a moderate amount of traffic. For example: if you have two separate keywords and one is 30,000 clicks a month and one is 1,000 clicks a month, then your 30,000 clicks a month should be more competitive....you have a higher likelihood of being able to rank higher in the less competitive, 1,000 clicks a month.

3.) variation with long tail keywords:. if you have long tail keywords that are very competitive and are derivations of other keywords that you think are important, they should rank higher in importance. For example. If you are selling diet plans. And you have 2 long tail keywords that work: "buying organic diet plans"  buying organic food for diet".  The first word is a more valuable keyword because it contains another more refined keyword that has value.

Your last question related to number of keywords is no easy answer. You should have as many keywords as you can manage. No set limit.  But make sure in your ad groups that you have isolated like keywords as that will increase your relevancy and quality score from google.

Hope this helps

[MoosaHemani]

Hey Andrew,

Let’s start this way… you have the data of keywords that you have extracted from the Adwords campaign. This is great if you can extract all the keywords that are most convertible in terms of conversions.

Step 2 would be to list down the keywords and notice the traffic, difficulty level and competition each keyword contains and then on the basis of total traffic, difficulty level and conversion rate list down the keywords accordingly. Ideally it should be from highest returns to lowest returns…

Now you have the data so target the keywords that are most convertible… it depends on the resources of how many keywords you should target and what resources should do what!

Hope that helps!