Sorry to have been away from the blog… it’s been just a bit busy!

Thought I’d write a very quick random message about “mining” keywords…

Smart marketers know to capture “low hanging” keywords for a variety of reasons, but here are three benefits:

1.  To get an edge on their competition by capturing keywords that their competition hasn’t thought of

2.  To get more out of a pay-per-click campaign by using more words that have lower bid rates, spreading your budget over a larger number of words

3.  By targeting more keywords, your site will get more traffic

Going after keyword phrases that your competition hasn’t discovered yet is one way to gain “the competitive edge”… more than 500 million keywords are searched every month on the major search engines - yet only 15-20% of those words have bids on the search engine pay-per-click programs. This is a gold mine of opportunity.

Now realize of course those keywords will have a lower volume of search than all the one-word and two-word keywords everyone is currently bidding on, but the conversion rates will be higher and you’ll spread your search marketing budget over a larger number of key phrases. A smarter budgeting plan.

Using more “mined” keyword phrases will provide you more traffic. This traffic is usually more targeted because as the keyword phrases get longer, they are usually more “defined” for what the user is looking for.

There are current studies that show that people are using longer keyword phrases for their searches - so why not include those phrases to capture that traffic?

So How Do You Mine For More Keywords?

1.  Brain storm

Use all your resources within your company operation. Have your people come up with possibilities… sometimes as site owners, we are too close to the project to be objective. So tap your associates for some new ideas

2.  Research

People search in a variety of different ways… and no matter how you may try to think like your customer, you may be missing something. Gather your marketing team to research search habits. Research the “buzz” words, current jargon and abbreviations associated with your market as well as how people are actually searching. Users may NOT be using the terminology that you or your marketing team uses. A good tracker will usually give you most of what you will need to research.

Some mining tools to research “low hanging” or alternate keyword phrases to expand your list are:

Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool

Google AdWords Keyword Tool

Keyword Tool External

Wordtracker

KeywordMax

Keyword Intelligence

Good Keywords

Internet users are becoming more sophisticated in how they search using longer keyword PHRASES to target what they are looking for. Internet marketers - fortunately for you - are not keeping pace with this trend - and that’s what drives the prices up so high on the one-word/two-word keyword search terms.

By thinking outside the box and pursuing those longer niche phrases, you can compete quite successfully with the bigger companies… it’s just mining gold from more rocks. But gold is gold, eh?

Til next time,

VDC