Top Four Key Issues - You Need To Consider When
Choosing Keywords For Your Domain
I have spent the last three weeks working with one
of my new clients. They have been building their
own website for over three years, spent $20,000 and
have virtually no traffic. Like many people on the
internet, they saw an opportunity to license some
material from another company and did so in the promise
they would make money. Yet to their distress they
have never ranked well online and have never had
high levels of traffic.
This particular client has spent thousands of dollars
on building email lists using Adwords to assist in
driving traffic their way. They are fast running
out of money and becoming very distressed. The client
has spent lots of money paying other people to get
search engine traffic but has never achieved a good
ranking and in some search engines did not even register
an existence.
Two weeks ago we worked out what keywords would
suit the licensed products that the client had purchased,
built a website based on the sales pages the licensor
had provided and using the right keywords this client
has now achieved the most outstanding results.
The client achieved within 1 week of the site being
live a #1 ranking in Yahoo.com on a keyword. A number
one ranking is predicted to bring about 50 hits a
day. The website also achieved a number 2 ranking
in Google.com on a keyword which is predicted to
bring about 150 hits a day. The reason our client
achieved these outstanding results was simply because
of the process we followed in choosing the right
and appropriate keywords for the domain and key webpages.
I should note that whilst the client will only pull
about 200 hits a day on this one key world, we expect
to make 3 to 5 sales a day for a $300 product. If
you look at the numbers from the best case scenarios,
the sales will pull $1,500 a day US which works out
to about $10,500 a week and about $500,000 a year.
Not bad for one single keyword.
There are four key issues you need to consider when
trying to choose the right keywords for your domain
name.
Issue #1 - Identify The Actual Words Your Customers
are Using To Search For Your Products
One of the biggest mistakes many people make is
to not do the research to identify the actual keywords
your customers are actually searching on. In fact
I have found that often what a client thinks their
customers are using to search for their products
is totally different to what their clients actually
search on.
There are many tools on the market to help you do
this and there are new ones coming out every week.
My team and I use a range of tools like WordTracker
and Overture to develop lists of keywords our clients
customers are actually searching on. I find that
Wordtracker is a fantastic tool for this.
When you are trying to use Wordtracker, I recommend
that you start your searches with just a single general
word about your product. This will give you a full
list of all the words and a range of important information.
Issue #2 - Identify the Right Keywords with Minimal
Competition
When you work with Wordtracker the system will give
you a range of information about your keywords including
the number of competing sites by search engine, the
total number of hits per day in total to expect and
a prediction of the number of hits per day by search
engine. There are two issues you need to consider.
One is the number of competitive sites for the keywords
and the second is the number of hits you can expect.
The number of competitive sites is the most important
issue to look. Keywords that have few competitive
sites are much better to go after than those keywords
that have lots of competitive sites as it can take
a while to rank well. For example, my team and I
have been going after a general term which currently
has about 900,000 competing sites. The downside is
that it takes a lot of work, lots of articles and
a lot of time to achieve a number one ranking. In
particular it has taken us 4 and half months to rank
in the top twenty and we expect it to take another
2 months to get into the top five.
I
know of one company that wanted to rank well for
the keywords "wholesale hats" and that
it took them 6 solid months of writing articles and
building back links to be ranked well in the number
one position. When you are starting out, you will
want to make sure that you choose low competition
websites. Now here is the interesting issue, just
because a keyword has 1 million competing webpages
does not mean that its going to be hard to rank well.
What you need to do is to identify how many backlinks
the top competitors has for the keywords. If the
top competitor's webpages have only a few links to
their page or even their site then you may find it
very easy to top those webpages.
One of the aspects to consider when choosing your
keywords is to make sure that your general keywords
are in fact included in the domain name. For example
if you were creating a website on Asthma, then in
your domain name, you would want to include the keyword
Asthma but it is unlikely you would get Asthma.com.
However you would want to include the term asthma
as the search engines give a better ranking to those
that have the keywords in the domain, simply due
to relevance.
Remember one key issue, the more relevant your keywords
and domain, the more likely your website will rank
highly.
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continues below
Issue #3 - Identify Keywords with
Good Daily Hits
The next issue you need to look at is the number
of daily hits you can expect using those keywords.
If the only keywords you can get with low competition
webpages have 10 to 30 hits per day, then it is going
to be a long haul.
The best type of keywords are those where you have
a couple of hundred hits per day, preferably a thousand
plus a day and only a few competing webpages. One
of the sites we did for one of my clients had 350
daily hits per day but only had 104 competing webpages.
This number of competing webpages is minute and it
will not take a huge amount to get a top ranking
position.
Issue #4 - See What Your Competitors Are Doing With
Your Keywords
The next issue you need to look at is which keywords
your competitors are using. When you are trying to
work out your domain name you need to weigh up what
your competitors are using to secure your customers,
what keywords they are using in the keywords section
of their meta data and what keywords they are using
in their webpages and the text in their hyperlinks
and their domains.
With all of this information you need to then balance
out which keywords will give you the best results.
Knowing what keywords your customers are searching
on, which keywords have the least competition, what
keywords your competitors are using and the total
number of hits per day on your keywords will help
you choose the right domain.
Oh and there is one other issue in all of this that
you need to consider, is the domain with the keywords
you have chosen still available?
Look the bottom line is that you want to build sites
that are relevant and bring value to your customers
and also to the search engines. If your websites
do not do that then you will never be truly successful.
All of the most successful websites in the world
actually follow this credo.
by Chris Le Roy
