EP 11: The Most Important Lesson When Selecting Keywords

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Podcast Transcript

Intro:

Welcome to SEObits, the podcast that helps smart business owners jumpstart their SEO strategy. Tune in each week for fresh SEO insights and actionable tips that will help you improve your site’s SEO one bit at a time. Now, here’s your host, SEO Trainer and Consultant, Rebecca Gill.

Rebecca Gill:

Of all the lessons I can offer in SEO, one of the most important one is about greed. And while it is an important SEO lesson, it is a simple one. My lesson is merely this. Don’t be greedy when selecting keywords. I learned this lesson through trial and error, through hard work, and through years of working on real world search engine optimization. I didn’t come to this conclusion lightly or even quickly. It’s something that I learned over time and as advance forward in my SEO education.

As most things in my life, I find the most simple and important lessons tend to be rooted in my childhood. These valuable nuggets were given to me by my grandmother, a smart and matter-of-fact woman who gave uncomplicated bits of wisdom that were delivered with great care and purpose. This lesson is no different.

My grandmother counseled me on greed many times and made sure I understood the value of giving and the dangers of taking. Those who have a tendency to pursue greed will undoubtedly find failure, frustration, and disappointment. Those are the words she wanted me to live by. I believe that greed has no place in life, business, or in SEO. And due to that, I think I listened to her pretty closely.

Today, I’d like to give you a real world example of keyword selection and you’ll see this bit with the greed lesson I learned from my grandmother. This is one from my past and I will use it because I have years of data to support it.

Prior to starting Web Savvy, I worked for an ERP Software company. If you’re unfamiliar with ERP Software, it’s simply business software that runs an entire organization. So, everything from basically accounts receivable and payable and the general ledger through sales and order entry and inventory and warehouse management, purchasing, manufacturing, everything that could be tapped in within a business.

So the software is pretty large. And the individual sales range anywhere from $50,000 to millions of dollars. Due to this, the ERP industry is highly competitive for both SEO and pay-per-click. This strong competition is a result of that high sales dollar for those individual purchases. Such large sales dollars means that a single user click and Google AdWords could costs anywhere between $25 and $50. This means that pay-per-click budgets don’t go very far and website traffic driven by natural SEO is priceless. Winning an organic SEO was difficult then and it’s still tough today.

When I say difficult, I mean really rough like picture David versus Goliath and know that in this story, I was little David.

So my website had to compete against enterprise software websites companies like SIP, Oracle, and Microsoft. And if you heard me talk about – in the past, you’ve heard me mentioned this. So these very large organizations would spend millions of dollars on SEO and pay-per-click advertising. And against their million dollar budgets was me, this self-taught marketer who had an interest in SEO and web design and at that point was literally teaching herself SEO as her daughter was next door watching Teletubbies MTV. I mean this is the frame-up of me and my education at that time and these big guys I was competing against.

But I learned quickly. And I had some valuable experiences that I grabbed and I carried with me along the way. So when I competed against these large firms, both SAP and sales, I won without much bloodshed or battle wounds and I learned a lot along the way. And the reason I learned a lot was because our situations were so different. So when things worked, I could really see they worked because of the volume of competition and the largeness, these corporations that I was competing against.

So my lesson that I took away from all of this and the most important one was not to be greedy when it comes to picking and selecting keywords. And whether that you’re looking at keywords or you’re looking at clients and you’re looking at sales, business in general, greed doesn’t have a place. You want to be able to do good and I believe the same is true with keywords. And so, I take this forward with me.

So illustrate my lesson, let’s look at the way ERP buyers searched for possible solutions ten years ago. The variety of the phrases that they used at that time was when ERP was just starting out. So ERP wasn’t really well-known at that time. So people would look for accounting software, distribution software, and manufacturing software. They would start with those phrases and then eventually they would get themselves to ERP and go, “Oh! Well, that’s really what I need.”

So when they’ve got to the phrase, ERP, they would say, “OK, I know now this is what I need.” And then they would start narrowing that down and start looking for variations of ERP. And those variations would be like ERP software, ERP system, ERP solutions, ERP software solutions. Those are just examples to give you.

So ten years ago, the volumes were different than they are today. But the concepts still remains the same and the search traffic is still the same. The individual volumes per phrase different because the reporting that we were receiving from the search engines but the way that those volumes vary is exactly the same as it was ten years ago. So the majority of people would search for ERP and then the next level down was ERP software and the next level down, ERP systems and then way down the pack was ERP solutions and solution. And they are singular and plural versions of those phrases.

The one that would stand out that you would want to go after was ERP softwares with the plural because when that was used, it was usually used by someone who didn’t have English as their natural language and it would be bringing in foreign traffic that for me our company really didn’t sell to. So for me, that was completely off the board right away. I knew I didn’t want it.

So I knew I wanted search traffic for all of those terms and I knew I was competing against Goliath and I only had so much time available. I knew I wanted them all but I couldn’t have them all. I had to start picking and choosing. I was painfully aware that I had zero funds to allocate to outside of systems of pay-per-click advertising. And I didn’t have a lot of internal resources to help me.

So to win in my battle against Goliath, I had to be very careful when selecting my keywords. And I did so by focusing on ERP software, ERP systems and ERP solutions. In doing so, I completely ignored the mother of all terms, ERP. The reason I did that was because I knew that ERP was going to be much more difficult to rank on and it was a broad term. It wasn’t going to translate into the success I needed in the shorter term and it wasn’t going to be very targeted to people that I was trying to reach.

Now, most people want to go for all of the terms and they certainly want to go for the highest volume keyword. That my friends, is a mistake. It’s like shopping a Lexus Stellar when you knew you can only afford a Ford Fiesta.

So in hindsight, I know myself. Control and focus was a very wise decision on my part. I can thank my grandma for that. Back then, large publications and massive websites dominated page one for the search term ERP. And I knew it would take me forever to win on it. So I knew I had to ignore it. I knew I had to apply the limited resources and time I had to something else.

I also knew that serious buyers would look for that shorter or that lower volume phrase ERP software. That was still bringing in like 20,000 or something searches per month, so it was a good keyword.

And then ERP systems was similar, creating a lot of good traffic volumes. So ERP was just a route to that true and more narrow search phrases of software systems and solutions so I knew I was safe to target those and that’s exactly what I did. I focused on those keywords that I could win on and I stayed true to my approach and my plan.

And guess what? I won. For years, my company’s website was on page one of Google for all of those term I targeted and the website was well and above all those large competitors. We were getting more traffic and we were getting better ranking.

Was I smarter than their massive marketing teams? Honestly, no. But I was only one person and I was in control of the website and the sitemap. And because I had that singular control, I was focused. I wasn’t a team of people who didn’t know what the other members were doing or what they were targeting. And you could see it back there when you looked at the content and the way that they were using those phrases.

They were all over the map. You could not tell which page or which piece of content and a website the search engines or users were supposed to use to try to find a phrase. It was just a big gobbledygook of content. And that’s how I won. I didn’t try and go after every single keyword scenario. Again, I was really, really focused.

The lesson for this hits home with me again and again because I am constantly trying to counsel SEO clients and my students that you can’t go after every variation of the top keyword phrase. And I try and tell them. It’s just a few trial efforts. You just get really, really frustrated and you end up giving up because you’re not making the ranking progress you want and you’re not bringing in the targeted traffic that you want.

Now, this is not [Phonetic] [0:09:58] an assumption. I have true trial and error and I have real world data that supports everything that I’m talking about. Not just for a little bit. I mean there is 10, 15 years of data that backs this up because I can go back now and see some of that content is still ranking where I left it, which amazes me.

So as I counsel clients and I did suggest recently, I tell them to pick the best keyword variations that will truly resonate with their target market. Ignore the rest if you have to even if only temporary. You need to first pick the ones that will really fit with who you are trying to reach out to, who you’re trying to help. You need to make sure if you’re just starting out with SEO that their volumes are reasonable for you. And a reasonable volume isn’t 60,000 searches per month. If you’re brand new, you need to scale that down.

Now, the variation of what works per what website is definitely going to change from website and writer and industry to another. So there isn’t a magical number that I can give you. But I do know that everybody can find their sweet spot for search volumes and then really own those volumes. I spoke at a conference this weekend and one of the things that I said was, “Listen, you need to pick the right keywords for your target market. Don’t go after 500 if you’re just starting SEO. Scale it back. If you’re just starting with SEO and you’re just really starting to optimize your blog or your website, pick 5 that you must have and own them. Make sure that you do everything you can to build them up and to nurture them. Then expand out so that you have some additional keywords and try to go after some lower volume so you can have some quick wins. Boost your confidence and so you can see what works and what doesn’t work.”

In SEO, it is truly best to let go of the greed when selecting keywords. You need to pick the right keywords based on your offering, your target market, your existing competition, and the search volumes. You need to stay focused and you need to be selective. And you need to remember that slow and steady is going to win the SEO war.

We are not in a rush to the finish line. This is a journey and the more serious you take your journey and the more focused you stay on your journey, the faster you’re going to win and the longer your success will stay. That’s how you win in SEO today. That’s how I won ten years ago. And I’m betting that’s how you’re going to win ten years from now.

Keyword research is an important and early step in a much longer SEO process. You have to get it right to be successful. I’d like to make that process easier on you so I’m going to give you a few takeaways in this episode show notes on SEObits.fm.

So if you’re listening on iTunes, just head on over to the website and download a few of the goodies I have available for you.

Thanks so much for joining me today. I look forward to chatting with you next week as we continue our SEO journey together.