Chapter 2. Keyword Research

SEO is necessary—you've got to do it if you want to rank well for keywords. Simple in concept, keywords are actually very complicated things. They bring order to chaos, define markets, and reveal intent. Keyword data simultaneously tells you how many people are looking for your product or service and what those people will do once they find you. The results of a keyword search can tell you who the top people are in an industry and inform you of upcoming trends in the market. Keywords are the most visible focal point of free market competition between business interests. Search engine optimization is a popularity contest for keywords and this is a popularity contest you want to win.

The most critical part of an SEO project is finding the right keywords. You will spend months working on your web site, getting links, and telling the world that your site is the authority on that keyword. It's critical that when you finally arrive, your customers are there to embrace...

What a keyword is

Keywords are many things to many people. For the purpose of this SEO campaign, there are really only two things about keywords that we need to understand to get the job done. Keywords aggregate searchers into organized groups and a keyword defines a market.

Note

Keywords are single words that a search engine user types into the search box to try to find what they're looking for. Key phrases are the same as keywords except for the fact that they consist of two or more words. For the sake of simplicity, throughout this book let's use keywords to mean both, keywords and key phrases.

Keywords aggregate searchers into organized groups

Millions of random people visit Google every day. When they arrive, they are amorphous—a huddled mass yearning for enlightenment with nothing more than a blank Google search form to guide them. As each person types keywords into Google and clicks the Search button, this random mass of people becomes extraordinarily organized. Each keyword identifies...

Why keyword research is important

As a Drupal site owner, you have the opportunity to position yourself as the best site available for the keywords people are searching for.

Note

Know thy customer

There are hundreds of good marketing books out there to help you better understand your audience. All that good information applies to SEO as well. The better you know your audience, the better you can guess what keywords they are typing in Google to find companies like yours.

You're an expert in your field, so of course you know many of the keywords that people use to find your products and services. But, are you sure you know them all?

A few years ago Tom, a friend of mine, hired me to do SEO for his high-end landscaping firm. His company designs and installs yards, trees, retaining walls, and so on, outside million dollar homes in the hill country near Austin, Texas. We sat down in an early morning meeting and he said, "Ben, the right keyword is landscaping. I know it so there's no reason to...

What your keyword goal is

Before you start looking at keywords, you need to fix your goal firmly in your mind. There are basically two major reasons to do SEO.

Goal 1: Brand awareness

This may come as a surprise but there are people out there who don't know that you exist. SEO is a powerful and inexpensive way to get your name out there and build some credibility with your target customers. There are three major types of brand awareness:

Company brand awareness

Company brand awareness works on getting the name of your company into the market. If you want to build credibility for Big Computers Unlimited as a whole, then you probably want a campaign focused on getting your company listed where other top producers of PCs are listed. PC, computer, or fast computer all might be good terms.

Product brand awareness

Product brand awareness focuses on building general market knowledge of one product or line of products that your company produces. If you work for Big Computers Unlimited and you want...

Keyword research tools

There are many tools to help you find the right keywords. It's not important that you use them all but you should try a few of them just so you can see what's out there. Here are my favorites in order of preference:

Your own web site

The most important keyword research tool at your disposal is your own web site, http://www.yourDrupalsite.com/. If you already have some traffic, chances are that they're coming from somewhere. With analytics installed, you should be able to find out what they're searching on with just a few clicks. If you have Google Analytics installed then you can easily see this data by logging in to its admin section and then going to Traffic Sources | Search Engines | Google.

This information can be invaluable if you cross-reference it with your current positions in the search engines. Say, for example, that you're getting 100 searchers a month on a term that you're on page 2 of Google. That's a good indicator that people are searching hard to find...

How to pick the best keywords

By now, you know the goals of your SEO campaign—branding, lead generation, sales transactions, and so on. Now, it's time to dig into the data. There are infinite number of ways to go about doing keyword research. I'm going to take you step-by-step through one of them. It's not necessarily the right or the best way but it's a good, solid technique that I've used many times to produce excellent results.

You need one more thing—a spreadsheet. Whether you use Excel, Numbers, or Google Docs, the easiest way to keep track of a list of keywords is in a huge spreadsheet. It doesn't have to be complicated, just a simple list of keywords and some key data about each one. Something like this:

Keyword Research

Keyword	Searched	Source	Difficulty	Rank	Keep?
…	…	…			…

Note

Google's list

Google will tempt you into adding all the keywords to a list that they'll keep for you and then you can download when you're done. I avoid this for two reasons. First...

Summary

In this chapter, we covered the tools you're going to need to do keyword research, from Drupal stats in your own web site to all the great tools available online. Keyword research is one of the most important things you'll do in SEO so make sure you've taken the time to do it right. At this point, you should have:

• A good understanding of the goals that you've set for your web site

• The Top Searches module installed

• A working knowledge of at least one of the keyword research tools—probably Google's tool

• A list of the keywords that will be the focus of your SEO campaign

In the next chapter, we starting putting those keywords to use on your Drupal web site

The rest of the chapter is locked

Summary

In this chapter, we covered the tools you're going to need to do keyword research, from Drupal stats in your own web site to all the great tools available online. Keyword research is one of the most important things you'll do in SEO so make sure you've taken the time to do it right. At this point, you should have:

• A good understanding of the goals that you've set for your web site

• The Top Searches module installed

• A working knowledge of at least one of the keyword research tools—probably Google's tool

• A list of the keywords that will be the focus of your SEO campaign

In the next chapter, we starting putting those keywords to use on your Drupal web site