I hope you remember from last week, that if you want unlimited converting traffic to your website you need to choose your keywords carefully. Last week we looked at building a list of keywords. Today we are going to select which keywords have the potential to make us money.
In order to do this you have to make sure that you realize the marketing channel you are going to use your keywords for. The three most important channels are the search engines, pay-per-click and article marketing.
In general, this is what you are looking for:
| Channel |
Keyword selection criteria |
| Search Engine Optimization | Buying keywords, high search volume, low competition |
| Pay-Per-Click | No specific criteria. Needs to be tested |
| Article Marketing | Long tail keywords, low volume, low competition |
When you optimize for the search engines, you have to realize that even though it sounds great to rank high for a popular keyword, if it is not a “buying” keyword it will not do you much good. So, how do you know if a keyword is a “buying” keyword. The only way to know for sure is to test, but here is how you can get close even without testing.
Let’s go back to our example of weight loss pills. Somebody who does not know anything about these pills will first look to educate themselves. They would do this with a phrase like “how do weight loss pills work”. Clearly a term that is used to gain a better understanding. Once they have found information on these pills, they will start looking for places to buy.
A popular term could be “free weight loss pills”, but this is obviously not a “buying” keyword. I am sure you get where I am going. People who are ready to buy look for something like “best weight loss pills”, or “phentermine” or something similar.
Now that you have identified your “buying keywords”, rank them in order of number of searches online. It depends on the niche your in, how many searches you need to set as your minimum. I simply leave them ranked and move on to the competition research (which we will do next week).
On the other hand if you are doing article marketing, you want long tail keywords that have little competition. It is ok if these keywords have low search volume, because you can increase the volume by writing more articles. If all your articles reach the first page in Google, you will still generate a lot of traffic to your website. A good rule of thumb is to select keywords with less than 1,500 searches per month in the Google Keyword Tool.
Pay-per-click is in a league of its own. It is hard to pinpoint the exact criteria for this channel, since the purpose of the use of PPC decides the criteria. But if you use the above logic, you should be able to figure out which keywords may be good to use. Obviously, it is going to take testing to decide if you were correct in your assumptions.
Now that you know what type of keywords to look for, depending on your marketing channel, go through your list of keywords and identify the “buying” keywords that are on your list. If you don’t have any (or you want more), go back to the keyword list generation post from last week and dig deeper to find keywords that can make you money.
Next week we will examine the competition, to decide on the exact keywords we are going to use to not only get unlimited traffic to our website, but also make sure that our audience is ready to buy when they get to our site.
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