SEO, Keywords, and Common Sense

By Kyle McCabe | November 17, 2011

I’m sure you’ve heard the saying “Common sense isn’t.” I find this to be true more often than not.

In the case of SEO and keywords, many times it seems “common sense” needs to be ignored or thrown out the window entirely. Every person has their own perspective and their own ways of doing things. Search is no different. Ask 10 people to find a single product online, you’ll probably get 7 different keyword searches.

In fact, according to Google’s internal data at the time of this post, 16% of searches each day have never been submitted before.

So where is the “common” here? We all want to optimize our websites for search engines – that’s how we get found these days. Hell, I have clients telling me this now, so I’d say it’s probably common sense. But what does it mean?

What is optimization?

“Optimization” seems to have a reputation for being some magical voodoo concoction we apply to the web server, or a wand we can wave at our screens and Inquisio Optimus! Heh. Not likely, Potter.

Search engine optimization is a very focused, data-driven effort. Like a thin-beam flashlight in a dark room, you can’t focus everywhere at once. You need to find the most relevant area (keywords) to focus on, and then put them on your website in a way that makes sense.

But you can optimize for only so many keywords before you’ve diversified your website’s subject matter into search obscurity. But how do we know what keywords to focus on? It’s actually very simple.

How to Choose Keywords

There are two main figures to focus on here.

Traffic: we need to determine as best we can how much daily traffic a keyword gets. By this I mean to ask how many searches per day, on average, occur for this particular word or phrase?

Competition: we also need to find out how many other websites are indexed for this phrase. This is our competition.

Google has all this data, and they’ve generously shared it with us. Competition is easy, as you just type the term into the search field and see how many total results are returned. That’s your total competition.

To get an idea of average traffic, we use Google’s Keyword Tool (sign in for best results). So let’s say I do woodworking and I want to sell items on my website. I need people to find my website for woodworking related terms. So let’s see what Google has to say.

Woodworking gets a monthly average of 823,000 searches, so a daily average of about 27000. This is fantastic! So let’s look at the competition: 53,300,000. Oh. Alright, so our chances of being ranked well for this keyword…pretty much zero, unless we have millions to spend.

But I don’t just do “woodworking,” do I? How about “custom woodworking?” Google says 403 average daily searches and about 1,820,000 competitors. That’s pretty good search traffic, but the competition is still really stiff. But I don’t do all kinds of woodworking, I specialize in furniture.

For “custom wood furniture” we have 146 average daily searches with 173,000 competitors. Ah, here we are – this is a good keyword phrase. Decent daily traffic that will be relevant, and not too much competition. I have a good chance of being ranked well for this term, given the right effort and enough time.

But this is just one keyphrase – I’ll need a small list of different keywords and phrases for my site. Better get researching!

Onward, upward

So you see the “common sense” approach doesn’t always work. Just guessing about keywords and optimizing for “woodworking,” would disappoint. A strategy based on research, however, will eliminate the guesswork and afford a much better chance at success. Of course there are more factors than just traffic and competition, but this is the starting point.

So let’s get started.

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