Why SEO For Profit Must Target Groups Of Keywords by Mark Nunney, 17 October 2008
You know targeting keywords is important, but targeting single keywords with your SEO is unlikely to be profitable – SEO for profit must target groups of keywords. Here we’ll tell you why and explain how.
Keywords are words used to search on search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.
SEO teaching is usually centered on single keywords and single pages.
This 'single keyword' approach is often useful but it misses the big picture: To be profitable, most websites will need to be successful for hundreds of thousands of keywords.
Let’s find that big picture and put SEO and keyword research into context and perspective.
SEO in context
A website needs enough traffic, sales and profit to maintain a significant part of its business. Perhaps...
as much as 50% of company turnover
at least one employee for the smallest of businesses
SEO in perspective
For a small business website, let's see how many...
- visitors are needed
- keywords must be targeted
- pages built?
We’ll look at some real figures for thinkingmanagers.com which supports one full-time employee and earns revenue from newsletter subscriptions and advertising.
The site has about 7,000 pages indexed by Google - see below:
…and 75,000 visits a month-see the following screenshot from a Google Analytics report:
Note that the site needs to be successful for 37,000 different keywords to bring 75,000 visitors and make enough sales to support just one employee (a ratio of visits:keywords of approximately 2:1).
These figures raise an obvious question: can you give 37,000 different keywords individual attention?
Of course you can't.
Those figures were for one month. If we look at the figures for two months, the proportion of visits to keywords used doesn’t change much (so the number of different keywords used almost doubles), as we can see in the following report:
One of the reasons for this is that as many as half of all searches made in any day are done so with unique keywords. Clearly, we can’t specifically optimize for keywords that are only used once.
The diagram below shows another Google Analytics report, this one from a higher traffic site. Again, we see that the ratio of visitors to keywords used is almost 2:1.
You can’t beat the stats - even a small business must target hundreds of thousands of keywords (I’d say millions but I don’t want to scare you).
This restricts effective SEO and keyword research, making that traditional single keyword approach seem almost comical in its inadequacy. So what to do?
We must think in terms of groups of keywords which I’ll call ‘keyword niches’ - a niche being…
… a group of keywords that share a single (seed) word.
A Wordtracker search, made with a seed word, shows us a keyword niche - or to be more accurate it shows a sample of a niche, using the keywords in its database. For example, let’s look at the ‘management style’ keyword niche, ie, searches (keywords) containing the words management + style.
The following diagram shows us Wordtracker’s results for the ‘management style’ keyword niche:
For our example site – thinkingmanagers.com – the following report from Google Analytics shows one month’s results for searches with that niche’s keywords:
Approximately 4,000 visitors came to thinkingmanagers.com after searching with 1,100 different keywords from the ‘management style’ niche.
This site targets those ‘management style’ words and thousands of others simply by writing quality, long articles that reference ‘management style’. We can’t specifically target the individual keywords but we can target the keyword niche, its seed word and then let the quality content chase the tail.
So instead of looking for, comparing and targeting single keywords, we must target keyword niches. For example, on thinkingmanagers.com, instead of targeting the following important single keywords:
- management style
- management theory
- quality management
- business strategy
- business management
- business development
- corporate culture
- entrepreneur
… we target each of the keyword niches for which those are the seed keywords. That job will clearly need a lot of content so you’ll want lots of ideas for creating your web content.
As we’ll cover in other articles, before creating that content we should find target niches and then prioritize them because we can’t work on them all at once.
We prioritize different keyword niches by finding out which ones will give our site the best return on our investment - an evaluation based on how successful our site currently is for each keyword niche (we look at current traffic and sales) and how successful it might be (we look at niche size, competition and potential sales).
The result of our prioritizing is our SEO strategy.
About Mark Nunney
Mark Nunney (@marknunney) has been a successful professional SEO since 2000 and is CEO of The Website Marketing Company, although (apart from the link in this sentence) he's never optimized their website! He also publishes ThinkingManagers.com, the business management website which he has optimized a bit. With Wordtracker he is committed to teaching 'SEO for profit in the real world'. You can follow Mark Nunney's SEO on Twitter.
14 comments
Interesting article. How do you measure effectiveness of your keyword niche? One way would be number of visits on that keyword niche. I'm wondering if there are any tools to look at where your particular keyword niche is in the search engine results.
really great concept, a ratio of visits to actual keywords, but i think more of a focus such as higher ratio leads to this or a low ratio means a lot of long tail keywords...
But since 2 of the keywords: "management styles" and "management style" account for roughly 50% of the traffic within the keyword niche it might be worthwhile to try to optimize the website for those two keywords. Especially taking into consideration that there are probably some competitors out there trying to obtain high rankings for those keywords. I guess that in most verticals there is a distribution not unlike that of "blockbusters vs. longtail". That a few keywords account for a disproportionate amount of the traffic but as soon as one moves beyond those "blockbuster keywords" one is left in the tail where each keyword is possibly matched by just one search. Therefore it might pay off to use both the tactics advised here which is kind of longtail in scope while at the same time investing a significant amount of effort in optimizing for the blockbusters.
Kathryn: Your analytics tool can measure each keyword niche’s visitors’ pages/visit, average time on site, bounce rate and whatever measures of response you configure it for. And of course the number of visitors, as you mention. You can also measure ranking by taking some sample keywords from your niche and tracking your sites rankings for them.
David: Use Wordtracker to find the length of the tail – the potential size of each keyword niche. Your site stats tell you how profitable that niche is for your site and how successful you currently are. The more successful you currently are (in a niche) the easier more success will be (in that same niche).
I think we could work out some fancy formulas to interpret the visits:keywords ratio but it would need to take account of the size of a niche’s long tail.
Whether at site or niche level, in general, a high visits:keywords ratio indicates an unexploited niche.
Mikhail: the page is optimized for those words ("management styles" and "management style"). And yes, do target both the ‘blockbuster’ words (nice description) and the long tail. Indeed, the whole point of this approach is that by targeting the blockbuster words and having good content you will target the tail without trying. This is how one page can target 10,000 keywords. One of my favorite results of this approach is that you can get nowhere for your main target keywords (the blockbusters) but still get thousands of results for the tail.
Kathryn: I should have pointed you to this article for help in assessing different keyword niches.
Thanks Mark - appreciate the responses and link to that article.
I can see this approach working. So far I've been focused on optimizing for single high-traffic terms because it's easier to know what your targeting that way.
Steven: When targeting groups of keywords (keyword niches) you can keep that 'easier to know what you're targeting' thing going by focusing on the niche's seed word. But whenever possible, add a lot of copy relevant to the keyowrd niche - start with a Wordtracker search to get some ideas.
Thanks Mark for the informative article and links...Niches, keywords, SEO, PPC; one feels like their heads spinning!!!!!
Thanks Mark for the article I am very new to Internet Marketing and what I have learnt so far was to target specific keywords this has given me something else to think about
Excellent article. Numbers do count. I am a poet - we control words - so your article has given me the tools to delve into that poet's toolbox and optimise my Web sites.
Thank-you, Mark. j
It's interesting to see that the many tools that analyze a web page for SEO score need to know what the main keyword phrase is to properly execute the analysis. Focusing each single web page on a primary keyword does not make for an exciting SEO strategy. This article has really helped me to explain and literally show people the potential of a well organized SEO plan. Thanks!