Prioritizing keywords

Be realistic about the breadth of your keyword profile: if you are just starting out in a competitive market, you may not realistically rank for all your desired keywords. Even experienced SEO professionals with tremendous link building power at their disposal will prioritize certain keywords for an initial launch and then introduce other keywords and keyword families in phases once rankings have been established.

It makes sense to work in phases, preferably in 90-day increments. Choose keywords that present a realistic and attainable goal of competitive rankings in three months. Once you meet your ranking goals for the first set of keywords, move on to the next set of keywords.

Building first, second, and third tier Keywords

So, which keywords should you work on first? Generally, your first tier keywords should get attention first. First tier keywords are your primary, high-volume, high-relevance terms. First tier keywords are generally more competitive, but they're likely where you'll get the lion's share of your traffic. For example, if you sell medical supplies in Chicago, your first tier keywords would include the following:

Next, you'll work on your second tier keywords. Second tier keywords are lower-volume category-based terms. This family of keywords will be larger than your first tier keywords, and search competition will be lighter. Some examples (again from the medical supply niche) of second tier keywords would include:

Finally, you will prioritize your third tier keywords. Your third tier keywords are your lowest volume: true long tail keywords. Third tier keywords describe specific products or services and specific model names and numbers. Again, some keyword examples would include:

Obviously, it makes more sense to endeavor to rank for the first tier keywords before ranking for more specific and low-volume second and third tier keywords. Prioritizing high-volume terms first will help bring great numbers of visitors sooner. There is one important exception to that rule: if your first tier keywords are too competitive, you may take too long to rank for those terms and you may wish to consider inverting your plan and prioritizing your second or third tier keywords first. Your goal is to get traffic quickly when you start up. Starting with lower tier keywords where the competition is lighter can help bring traffic more quickly.

Accounting for seasonal trends

Seasonal trends effect keyword volumes in varying degrees. In some industries, there is almost no seasonal variation in keyword volume. Examples of such industries include staple products like groceries, telephone services, family medicine, auto repair the things that all folks need pretty much all the time. Then on the other end of the spectrum are those products that are acutely seasonal. The most pronounced examples would be Santa dolls around Christmas time, pool building services in spring and summer, air conditioning repair in summertime in the Southern U.S., weight-loss programs just after New Year's and in the spring.

The truth is that nearly all keywords are seasonal to some degree just perhaps not enough to worry about. Sure, family medicine business will drop off during summer while folks are away on vacation. But, if you are a family practitioner, small dips in seasonal volume won't affect your strategy enough to warrant major changes in your approach. Seasonal variations in keyword volume will matter more to people in truly seasonally-based industries.

So, how would an air conditioning repair business work around seasonal changes in keyword traffic for "Air conditioning" terms? Surely the keyword traffic would drop off in cold weather (believe me, it does). The answer is to prioritize air conditioning terms in the spring and summer and then prioritize heating and heating repair terms in the late summer and fall to capture shifts in seasonal traffic.

Spotting seasonal keyword patterns with Google Trends

Google Trends is a useful tool when trying to determine the timing of a marketing campaign. It can also give you a bigger picture than just looking at the traffic for the most recent month, which could help you avoid seasonal keywords that have had a high traffic volume recently but may be getting ready to drop significantly in the near future.

Some keywords are obviously seasonal, such as Christmas, Halloween and Santa. However, not all seasonal keywords are so obvious. Typing a keyword into Google trends allows you to view a graph that shows the spikes in search volume for a given term over the past six years. With such a huge amount of data available, it is easy to see whether the search volume spikes at the same time each year.

One example of a seasonal keyword that is not so obvious is "Plasma TV." Now, if you think about it, it's easy to see why this keyword is seasonal. A lot of people buy these expensive televisions as a Christmas present for the family, so it makes sense that there is a huge spike in search volume for this keyword at the end of every year. After running this keyword through Google Trends, it is obvious that January would be a bad time to launch a campaign to sell plasma TVs.

Google Trends also allows you to see whether the search volume for a certain term is going up or down over time. Going back to the plasma TVs, you can see that although the upward trend at the end of the year is consistent, the overall search volume has been going down a small amount each year for the past three years. This could be due to the economy or perhaps there is another type of TV that is taking up the slack.

If you want to narrow down the trends even more, you can filter the results in Google trends by country or state. You can also view data for each year separately instead of viewing everything at once. Google Trends also gives links to the top related news stories and charts the location for each on the graph, so you can see what effect these events may have had on the search volume.

Google Trends can help you spot changes in seasonal keyword interest. Below is a fairly stark example: Keyword traffic for "Weight loss" spikes considerably near the new year and drops off during Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Tuning your list: Negative keywords

Negative Keywords are words for which you do not want to capture search traffic. Put another way, negative keywords are words that when they appear in a search query, represent an intent that makes the searcher undesirable as a customer. For example, the term "DIY" (do-it-yourself) is a term typically employed by ambitious homeowners who want to find information to fix broken items themselves rather than pay a service. Here's another example: if you offer window replacement for residential homes, you want to avoid traffic for "Car window repair." You can use the negative keywords "Auto" and "Car" to avoid those searches.

The well-known SEO speaker Dan Thies once commented, when asked about a list of effective negative keywords that folks should exclude from their keyword campaigns, "I can give you a list of good negative matches: free. That's the list." That's a helpful suggestion, but it's not that simple. If you offer free shipping, you'll hardly want to turn away people looking for "diamond rings free shipping."

Negative keywords are most important in a pay-per-click environment where an irrelevant click might cost $3 the "danger" of garnering an irrelevant click simply isn't present in natural search. Adding negative keywords to a Google AdWords campaign is easy, and can be done in two ways:

Grouping keywords into families

You'll want to group your keywords into families of related terms. There are several benefits. Your keyword families form the genesis of sections, categories, and pages on your website. Also, your keyword families can serves as highly organized ad groups for pay-per-click marketing.

Let's examine how to divide keywords into families based around common terms and how to implement the families into your keyword strategy. First, group your keywords around popular terms, as shown in the following section.

Keywords organized into families in the niche of House Painting

The preceding table is hyper-simplified, but illustrates a sensible way to categorize painting-related keywords. The "Interior Painting Terms" family is all based around the term "Interior" while the "Exterior Painting Terms" family is based around the term "Exterior." It takes no great leap of logic to figure that it would also be sensible to structure sections and/or pages of your website around these families.

For example, a well-written web page about interior painting services with pictures of interior painting projects can serve as a landing page that ranks for (and converts) customers searching for interior painting services. Conversely, it would be more difficult to create a page that would rank for two families of terms, both "Interior" and "Exterior" terms. As all the terms in the Interior Painting Terms family contain the term "interior," you need only one destination web page to rank for the entire family of terms. Naturally, the words "Interior painting" and "Interior painter" will be the primary keywords that you'll use in the core elements of the interior painting landing page.

These families of keywords can also serve as well-organized ad groups in pay-per-click campaigns. Both Google and Yahoo's pay-per-click services utilize a format where advertisers combine their keywords into groups. When pay-per-click keywords are organized into groups, the campaigns are more effective than single-group campaigns. The text ads served by group can be focused more relevantly on the topic of the group yielding higher click-through rates and higher quality scores. Then you can employ individual landing pages based on each keyword group, which will increase conversions over a general page.