The Art of SEO : Determining Keyword Value/Potential ROI

1. Estimating Value, Relevance, and Conversion Rates

When researching keywords for your site, it is important to judge each keyword’s value, relevance, and potential conversion rate. If a keyword is strong in all three criteria, it is almost certainly a keyword you want to plan to optimize for within your site.

1.1. Determining keyword value

When judging the value of a keyword, you should contemplate how useful the term is for your site. How will your site benefit from targeting these keywords?

1.2. Identifying relevant keywords

To identify relevant, high-quality keywords, ask yourself the following questions:

How relevant is the term/phrase to the content, services, products, or information on your site?

Terms that are highly relevant will convert better than terms that are ancillary to your content’s focus.

Assuming a visitor who searches for that term clicks on your result in the SERPs, what is the likelihood that she’ll perform a desired action on your site (make a purchase, subscribe to a newsletter, etc.), create a link to your site, or influence others to visit?

It is a good idea to target keywords that indicate imminent action (e.g., buy cranium board game, best prices for honda civic), because searchers are more likely to perform the corresponding action on your site when they search for those terms than they are for terms such as honda civic or cranium board game. Your click-through/conversion rates are likely to be higher if you target keywords that indicate the intent behind the search.

How many people who search for this term will come to your site and leave dissatisfied?

Pay attention to your site’s content and compare it to what other sites in the top results are offering—are these sites doing or offering something that you haven’t thought of? Do you feel as though these sites offer a more positive user experience? If so, see what you can learn from these sites and possibly emulate on your own.

You can also use an analytics program and check to see which of your pages have the highest abandonment rates. See what you can change on those pages to improve user experience and increase users’ level of enjoyment when using your site.

It is important to categorize your keywords into high and low relevance. Generally, keywords of higher relevance will be more beneficial to your site in that they best represent your site as a whole. If, when judging the relevance of a keyword, you answer “yes” to the preceding questions, you’ve found a highly relevant term and should include it in your targeting.

Keywords with lower relevance than those that lead to conversions can still be great terms to target. A keyword might be relevant to your site’s content but have a low relevance to your business model. In this case, if you target that keyword, when a user clicks on your site and finds the content to be valuable she is more likely to return to the site, remember your brand, and potentially link to your site or suggest it to a friend. Low-relevance keywords, therefore, present a great opportunity to strengthen the branding of your site. This type of brand value can lead to return visits by those users when they are more likely to convert.

1.3. Determining conversion rates

A common misconception is that a conversion refers only to the purchase of an item on your site. However, many different types of actions users perform can be defined as a conversion, and they are worth tracking and segmenting .

The many different types of conversions create distinct opportunities for targeting various keywords. Although one keyword may work well for purchase conversions, another may be well suited to get users to subscribe to something on your site. Regardless of what type of conversion you are optimizing for, you should strive to have each keyword that you intentionally target convert well, meaning it should be relatively successful at getting searchers to click through to your site and, consequently, perform a specific action.

To know which keywords to target now (and which to pursue later), it is essential to understand the demand for a given term or phrase, as well as the work required to achieve those rankings. If your competitors block the top 10 results and you’re just starting out on the Web, the uphill battle for rankings can take months, or even years, of effort, bearing little to no fruit. This is why it is essential to understand keyword competitiveness, or keyword difficulty.

To get a rough idea of the level of competition faced for a particular term or phrase, the following metrics are valuable:

• Search Demand Volume (how many people are searching for this keyword)

• Number of Paid Search Competitors and bid prices to get in the top four positions

• Strength (age, link power, targeting, and relevance) of the Top 10 Results

• Number of Search Results (it can be valuable to use advanced operators such as “exact search” or the allintitle and allinurl operators here as well; see http://www.netconcepts.com/google-ebook/ http://www.netconcepts.com/google-ebook/ for more on using these specialized searches for keyword research)

SEOmoz offers a Keyword Difficulty Tool that does a good job collecting all of these metrics and providing a comparative score for any given search term or phrase.

In addition, Enquisite Campaign provides “optimization difficulty” estimates pertaining to paid search competitiveness that is based on the number of bidders and the cost to be in the top four positions.

2. Testing Ad Campaign Runs and Third-Party Search Data

One of the things we have emphasized in this chapter is the imprecise nature of the data that keyword tools provide. This is inherent in the fact that the data sources each tool uses are limited. It turns out that there is a way to get much more precise and accurate data—the trick is to make use of Google AdWords.

The idea is to take the keywords you are interested in and implement a simple AdWords campaign. Assuming that you are implementing this campaign solely to get keyword volume data, target position #4 or #5. This should be high enough that your ads run all the time, but low enough that the cost of collecting this data won’t be too high.

Once you have run this for a few days, take a look at your AdWords reports, and check out the number of impressions generated for the keyword. Although this data is straight from Google, it is important to remember that the advertisers’ ads may not be running all the time, so more (possibly even significantly more) impressions may be available.

Next up, you want to think about the value of achieving certain rankings in the organic results. You can come up with a good estimate of that as well. The key here is to leverage what you know about how click-through rates vary based on organic search position. Table 1 depicts click-through rates by SERP position.

This data, of course, is aggregated across a very large number of searches on AOL, so it serves only as an estimate; but if you are in position #1, the estimate is that 42.1% of the people who will search on a term will click on your result. In the case of our term that is searched 52 times per day, the site in the #1 position will get about 22 clicks per day.

Note:

There are certain search terms in which these estimates do not apply. For example, if the user searches on a brand term, the focus on the #1 position is much, much higher. Publishers in lower positions still get some traffic, but at lower percentages than we’ve outlined here.

So, now you have a working estimate of the search volume and the number of clicks per day that the term will deliver. Can you get an estimate of conversion rates as well? Yes, you can. This requires only a simple extension of the AdWords campaign: implement conversion tracking, with the free capability provided by Google or via another method at your disposal.

Once you have that in place, look at how your AdWords campaign performs. If the conversion rate is a lofty 5% for one keyword and 3% for another keyword, chances are that your organic search conversion rates for those two keywords will vary by a similar amount. Be aware, though, that although paid search results get significantly less traffic than organic search results, paid click-throughs do tend to convert at a somewhat higher rate (1.25 to 1.5 times, according to Enquisite). Using the preceding example, this suggests that we will get a little less than one conversion per day as a result of being in the #1 position.

This data is great to have in hand. However, it does not mean you should use this methodology instead of other keyword tools. It takes time to implement, and time to collect the data. The keyword tools will get you started in real time. Nonetheless, using AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, or MSN adCenter can provide you with some great data.

3. Using Landing Page Optimization

Landing page optimization (sometimes also called conversion optimization) is the practice of actively testing multiple variations of a web page (or website) to see which one performs the best. Typically, this is done as part of an effort to improve the conversion performance of the site.

The simplest form of this type of test is called an A/B test. A/B tests involve creating two different versions of a page, and then randomly picking which version to show to a new visitor to the site (old visitors get the version they saw the last time they visited). You then measure the behavior of the visitors to the two different versions to see which group of visitors completes conversions on the site. You have to be careful to wait until you have a statistically significant amount of data to draw a conclusion. Once you have this data you can analyze it and decide on more tests, or simply pick the winner and move on.

Multivariate testing is a bit more complex, because it involves more than two variations in the test. In addition, you can mix and match multiple variations. For example, you may want to try two different logos, two different calls to action, three different page titles, two different color schemes, and so on. In multivariate testing, any combination of your elements could be what is shown to a particular visitor. Obviously, more data (visits and actions) is required to draw a conclusion than in a simple A/B test.

Landing page optimization can help in determining the value of a keyword because one of the elements you can be testing is the impact on coversion of variations of a keyphrase in the page title, the page header, and in other strategic places on the page. One variation of the test would use one keyphrase and the other variation would use a different one.

You can then see which keyword provides the best results. This data can provide you with an interesting measure of keyword value—its ability to help you convert your visitors. However, landing page optimization is not something you can use to perform SEO tests (i.e., to see which version of a page ranks higher), as SEO tests can take weeks or even months to see results.