articles

The “Right” Keywords

By Theresa Wilkinson, W-edge design
Reprinted with permission from the STC Intercom magazine - February 2004 Volume 51, Issue 2.

Last fall, one of the people I mentor, Andrew White, e-mailed me, asking how to get his site ranking higher on Google. He is the webmaster for a church Web site and was not happy that another church site with the same name outranked his site. I looked over his keywords and site text: He did not have very strong keywords. His primary keyword phrase was the name of his church. I wondered about this: How many people search for the name of a church? If you want your efforts at search engine optimization (SEO) to bear fruit, be it an organic campaign, a paid sponsorship, or Google Adwords, you must choose the keywords that your target audience is using to find your site or product. Otherwise all your efforts are in vain.

Which Keywords?

I am currently contracting, but hope to be hired permanently as webmaster, for a company that specializes in call center software. I was brought in to completely redesign the corporate Web site and a customer-only site, and to build an intranet. I have been busy designing the architecture of the new site and collecting and writing new content.

While compiling my list of generic keywords, I asked my boss what products the company really sells. He answered “customer care contact center” software. I had heard this expression, but on the current site, it says “CRM software”; I also found “call center software.” If you know anything about the CRM business, you know that CRM software also includes sales and marketing automation software. This company does not currently offer this software. Furthermore, when I checked out “customer care contact center” in Wordtracker.com, I found only two searches for this expression. In other words, this was not a good keyword phrase. However, “call center software” had some great numbers, so my boss and I decided that this would be our focus--as well as the focus of the new marketing campaign.

Since finding the right keywords is the most important step in any SEO endeavor, it is imperative that you find the ones your target audience is using. My new site may rank really high for a keyword phrase like “customer care contact center,” but if my target audience is using the phrase “call center software,” the site won’t get any traffic.

Analyzing Your Users

Andrew’s site used the following keywords: CrossRoads Church, casual, church, crossroads, fort worth, contemporary, cross-cultural, multi-ethnic, creative arts, hope, happiness, fossil creek, texas. His site title is “CrossRoads Church of Fort Worth.” Note that most of his keywords are not incorporated into his title.

I started to wonder, if I were searching for a church online, would I search by the name of the church or by the religion? I have looked into how people search online and have heard on studies of this topic. (I found a great study from Penn State that I will include in my next article.) The most valuable information I have found is through Wordtracker.com, which shows you how many people actually use the search term you enter.

Church Search

If you were moving to a new area or a new city, would you search the Web for the name of a church? Perhaps, if you knew its name, but suppose you didn’t? What would you search for? I surmised that the approach would be by categories such as faith, geographic location, religion, or general type of church, such as "informal."

To answer this question, I did some digging on Wordtracker.com. The term “Methodist” brings up "Methodist religion," "Methodist beliefs," "Methodist church," and other phrases. “Religion” brings up "Catholic religion," "Muslim religion," "Jewish religion." “Christian” brings up Christian music, Christian songs, Christian Web sites. These phrases are all very broad.

I then did some digging on some proposed new keywords from Andrew. Table 1 shows the results.

Table 1. Proposed Keywords: Church Search

Keywords	Wordtracker.com results
contemporary christian church fort worth texas	no results
informal bible study north tx	no results
crossroads church of fort worth	no results
laid-back non-denominational church fort worth	no results
contemporary christian music	>644 (too broad)
multi-cultural membership	no results
multi-cultural church	no results
multi ethnic church	no results
christian worship haltom city	no results
christian worship fort worth	no results
non-denominational christianity	19 (too narrow)
churches ft worth non-denominational	no results
christian fellowship	73 (not bad)

I also discovered using Wordtracker.com that these phrases are too broad: Baptist, Baptist church, catholic, Episcopal, Episcopal church, Methodist, Methodist church, southern Baptist, southern Baptist church.

I e-mailed this message to Andrew: “You need to think like a person who has just moved to a new area and is looking for a church.” I suggested that Andrew think about “Christian religion, Christian religions, christian religion beliefs, Christianity, Christianity beliefs, bible study, bible study groups and Christian bible studies.” I also asked him to check out his competition and to see what they were doing with their keywords, though this practice is not always helpful.

How Do Users Search?

I put on my thinking cap and started typing in keywords to both Wordtracker.com and Google.com. I began with the knowledge that searching for a single keyword can bring up thousands of search results. For example, the phrase “christian church” displays 2,600,000 Web sites. Remember that users understand that they need to use multiple keywords to get the results they are looking for--or at least as close as possible to what they are looking for.

Refining Your Keywords

I e-mailed to Andrew: “I think you really need to get a phrase that will describe the type of church you have. Get some additional phrases and e-mail them back to me.”

After some brainstorming, Andrew sent me more than 100 phrases broken into six categories. I've listed the categories below, with a sampling of phrases from each. (Note the lowercase spellings--most people user lowercase letters when searching.)

• Location. north texas, north tx, fort worth, north fort worth, haltom city, keller
• Atmosphere. casual, informal, relaxed, laid-back, come-as-you-are, easy-going
• Creative. active, loud, fun, original, inspired, artistic, inventive, resourceful
• Contemporary. contemporary, 21st century, twenty-first century, modern
• Cross-Cultural. hispanic, mexican, vietnamese, black, african-american
• Religious. church, new, new church, religion, relationship, bible, bible study

I was very pleased--Andrew had given me great stuff to work with. I began by taking some suggestions from each category and then plugging them into Wordtracker and Google.

Finding Keyword Phrases

From what I can see of keywords used in Wordtracker, people seem to be searching for religion/denomination/location. So I skipped Andrew’s creative and cross-cultural keywords. Here are some of the phrases I checked:

contemporary christian church fort worth texas; informal bible study north tx;
laid-back non-denominational church fort worth

No luck with these--users don’t seem to use this many keywords combined. However, I did find the following phrases that had good numbers:

congregation independent christian, christian worship fort worth,
nondenominational christianity, churches fort worth nondenominational christian fellowship,
fellowship church, non-denominational churches, non-denominational churches in fort worth tx, christian church fort worth

I suggested that Andrew take out the city and state elements and refer to them in the site title tags and Web page text.

I also found some church directories in the process. And recently, I was looking into some Google Adwords for a potential client who is a fishing guide and actually found directories for fishing guides. So it is always useful to check to see if you can find any directories for your site--some of them are free.

The final keywords for Andrew's site follow:

congregation independent christian, christian worship, non-denominational christianity, churches non-denominational, christian fellowship, fellowship church, non-denominational churches, christian church, informal bible study, contemporary christian church, laid-back non-denominational, christian worship, christian fellowship

Note that these are not in any order. The idea was that Andrew would take three or four keywords to optimize each page with meta data and site text.

Placing Keywords

Once you get the keywords that you think your target audience will use, put them where they will count the most. The first and most important place for search engine rankings is your title tag (within your META information). You might want to see my article “Search Engine Optimization: Making the Most of META Tags” (Intercom, September/October 2002) for more information on writing a title tag. And the second most important place is your Web site text.

So remember, choose the keywords you are sure your target audience will be using. Go to Wordtracker and check words and phrases, or just type keywords into Google and see what comes up. Put those keyword phrases into a meaningful title tag. And don’t forget about site text.

I will be implementing a lot of my SEO knowledge on my new site over the next few months, so I can write an update to my lessons learned on that. I am also investigating Google Adwords and pay for placement ads, so look for an article soon on those results. I am doing a lot of homework on all these topics now, and should be able to share a great deal of information when this project is completed.

References:

“Impatient Web Searchers Measure Web Sites' Appeal In Seconds” Penn State Study on how people use search. www.psu.edu

Related articles

• The Scoop on Search Engines
• Marketing your Web site
• Search Engine Optimization: Keywords that Work
• Search Engine Optimization: Making the Most of META Tags
• Search Engine Optimization: Designing a Search-Friendly Site
• Search Engine Optimization: Register Your Site for Free
• The “Right” Keywords
• What is Link Popularity?
• How to Get Higher Search Engine Rankings
• February newsletter - SEO sites to go to to keep up-to-date with changing SEO information
• January newsletter - when to register with search engines
• December newsletter - PPC (pay per click) ad fraud on Google and Overture
• November newsletter - ranking in a search engine after site redesign
• October 03 issue - how often submit to search engines
• September 03 issue - META description not showing in search engines
• August 03 issue - importance of keywords in META tags
• July issue 02 - importance of Title tag and page text