Wordtracker 7-Day Video Tutorials
Day 3: How to Build an Effective Keyword Strategy
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Video notes
Search engine success requires a keyword strategy. You need to prioritize your possible niches and to decide what pages will target which keywords.
To succeed you need a hierarchy that includes: home page keywords, section or category pages and individual pieces of content.
Take PPOnline. There are a series of categories on the left including badminton, baseball, basketball and distance running. Choosing one will bring up a wide range of related content including answers to readers questions, distance running forums and social groups and articles relevant to distance runners specifically.
Say there's an Osteopath who wants to set up a website on backpain and related conditions. He uses Keyword Universe and his own industry knowledge to build a list of his own seed keywords e.g. back pain, jumper's knee, trapped nerves. Each keyword is a possible niche that could serve as an individual section of the site, a category page that contains articles based on distinct keywords. For 'neck pain' the hierarchy would consist of 'neck pain' category page and 'exercises to beat neck pain' as an example content page.
Set up a new project called 'back pain website' in Keyword Researcher, add in the seed list (niches) with the following options set: exact keyword only, uppercase and lowercase combined and plural forms. We get back niches such as: sciatica, back pain, tennis elbow. There are many ways of prioritizing the keyword list but for the moment lets keep things simple and prioritize based on popularity.
Pick the top 7 most relevant niches.
Now we have to build a content section for each of the niches. Use Keyword Researcher to get the top 1000 keyword searches and build lists for all seven. Now we have a project with seven lists with potentially thousands of keywords in each.
We want to narrow this down to 5 - 10 keywords for each niche. Our Osteopath can work on one niche at a time, build in a page for each keyword and conducting a link building campaign for each niche.
You can evaluate 'neck pain' against Google to see which keywords are easiest to target and have the best chance of being ranked. The higher the KEI (keyword effectiveness index) the more attractive the keyword.
It's hard for new sites to compete against established ones, so look for sites with high popularity and low competition (i.e. have a high KEI). Then you have a good chance for ranking for more popular keywords so try and target those with little regard for the competition.
It's advisable to target a mix, concentrating on popular keywords and those with a high KEI.
Look for signs of success and build upon it. If a minor success is doing particularly well, adding more content and link building will enhance that success and bring more traffic to the niche in general.
