Do you have that SEO Gut Feeling?

I was talking with one of the other SEO team at Pin Digital a few days ago about how to prioritise keywords to target for client sites.  The most obvious way to decide is to look at the number of searches that keyword usually generates and order them in priority that way.  But is that always the most effective strategy in terms of ROI?  How exactly do you decide which keywords to target first and how much resource to commit to each one?

Search Volume

Lets have an example – “pet insurance” generates around 28,000 monthly searches according to the Google Search Based Keyword Tool.  The closely related keyword “pet health insurance” generates 3,500 monthly searches.  So investing time and money to get to number 1 for “pet insurance” should bring you the most traffic and best return shouldn’t it?  Well that depends on a number of things -

• How targeted the people using this keyword are to your product
• The difficultly in getting to number 1 for this keyword and capturing a large chunk of that 28,000 people – more to the point the time and resource required to do this
• The quality of the site you’re working on and its ability to rank

Competitor Analysis

This is where competitor analysis comes into the equation.  You need to run analysis of at least the top ten results for this keyword to assess their strengths, weaknesses and try to see exactly why they rank in the positions they do.  Then run a comparison to your own site to see how far behind (or ahead ) you are.  This will give you a good idea of exactly how much work is required to get the website ranking at the top and getting a share of the traffic.

There are however some problems with this, you can’t run this kind of analysis manually for every keyword you are targeting.  Yes you can get some cool software written to gather metrics for you which is one way of doing it, again though this can take a long time and the after-analysis of the stats can be a bit time consuming.

Search Volume and Conversion Analysis

Another method of determining keyword targeting priority is to run some analysis of the potential traffic you can get for a given keyword, then work out roughly how much extra revenue this brings.  For this you need to know overall search volume along with the share of this volume that each position in Google gets.  We all know that the top three positions get the most but you need to know the percentage to get an idea of what numbers in traffic you can expect for getting to a certain position.

You then need to know how well a visitor using this keyword converts on your website.  Combine this with the estimated number of people you can expect for each top 10 position in Google and you should get an idea of the revenue it will bring.

Client Satisfaction Factor

No matter what stats, advice, graphs or tables you present to your client, they will always want to be number 1 for their favourite keywords.  Normally these are very broad terms which yes will bring a lot of traffic but probably will not convert as well as other more specific keywords which you’ve found via your own research.

So you always need to keep this keywords fairly high on the list despite what your research tells you.  Your client will always want the satisfaction of being higher than their competitors for popular industry keywords – so don’t forget them!

When you can’t always use these techniques…

We’ve all been there, called into a client meeting unexpected and put on the spot to answer a clients questions.  One which often comes up for me is something along the lines of -

“Can you get us to number 1 for my favourite keyword?”

Now I have confidence in my ability to carry out SEO but you have to be realistic and honest when it comes to questions like this.  I’d never come out with -

“Oh sure no problem just give us a few weeks”

Unless I’d had time to perform the appropriate analysis above of course!  Often I’m called into meetings where I don’t get to prepare such analysis.  So I have a matter of seconds to analyze the top 10 results for a certain keyword before delivering some kind of answer to the client which assures them I know what I’m talking about whilst being careful not to raise their expectations without valid reason.  Enter the…

SEO Gut Feeling

Now I’m not saying that my gut feeling is worth more than the stats and analysis that come with time, however we’re all often required to go with our gut feeling or instinct when it comes to a lot of things in life.  Work is no different.

I have got to the point now where I can look at a set of search results and know straight away whether or not I stand half a chance of getting a site to rank there quickly or even at all.

Its all about ROI…

If time is short, I’ve been known to go with my gut feeling in the absence of stats and figures – if I believe it brings a better ROI.  I often look at a clients ranking for a certain keyword and know that I’ll only need a few on-site changes to show an improvement – this can be a matter of minutes sometimes.  This kind of timescale allows me to work on a load of keywords very quickly and provide a good ROI for the client.

Other times I know without carrying out any research that a certain keyword target will require not only on-site changes, new content but some pretty powerful links too – this can take a long time.

At times like this you need to offset the time taken for each and work out which keyword targeting will bring your client the best ROI, how do you know how to work this out?  The gut feeling

I’m working on creating some systems at Pin Digital that will give a more scientific answer to the question of which keywords should be focused on first for the best return.  For the moment though, my gut feeling takes control!

A Word of Warning…

I’m not perfect, I’ve made mistakes in the last two years as a full time SEO.  I love being able to go with my instinct and see the rewards later on when it pays off.  However sometimes you need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture, are you really doing whats in the best interests of the client or are you trying to satisfy your own need to do well at something.

So how many of you have the SEO gut feeling

Tags: ecommerce seo, SEO, seo gut feeling, seo instinct