Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [71]
This provided a valuable experience as to the emotional state that can drive people in their searching. Sometimes events come upon us that drive an incessant searching for information. In that case, rankings do not matter, but content does. During the search, we are swayed in many directions, based on the content, and we start to make emotional attachments based on others’ experiences and the content we find. People in this state will read more of the content they find, and patience is not an issue; comprehensiveness is the issue.
Realize that searchers are not a single entity of behavior but are made up of different motives, needs, and emotional states as they search. It will drive the keywords they use, the behavior they exhibit on the site, and the patience level for finding content.
Friday: Organize for Optimization
Now that you have been researching with keyword tools, surveying the information on your website, and developing buying cycles for your content, the next step is to organize this data. Based on needs, long tail terms, and buying cycles, one of the best ways to organize keywords is to start with the anchor term (or core term).
Today’s example will focus on cars, specifically the Chevrolet Corvette, as the anchor term to illustrate how you can organize keywords to better utilize the breadth of terms and popularity for easy implementation to the website.
Visualize the Data
At the highest level, your keyword research provides a basic list of keywords and their popularity. This is the primary way that results are presented in most keyword tools. At that point, you can export the results into a spreadsheet so that you can move the fields and data into a more manageable format.
The second level of organizing keyword data is to arrange the keyword terms into a display based on words that come before the anchor term (prefix) and words that come after the anchor term (suffix), as in Figure 6-17. This is where a tool like Microsoft Excel is indispensable.
Figure 6-17: Use a spreadsheet to arrange keywords based on associated terms.
As shown in Figure 6-17, the anchor term is corvette. The most popular term associated with corvette is corvette parts. The term parts is in the Suffix column, and the average monthly searches for the phrase Corvette parts is shown in the rightmost column; you can see that this phrase is the most popular of all the related terms.
The second most popular search phrase is Chevrolet Corvette; however, Chevrolet is used as a prefix, so it is listed in the second column from the left, next to the monthly search count. Other terms are arranged according to the popularity of the associated phrases. In arranging the keywords in this manner, searcher behaviors begin to exhibit themselves, which will help you in your optimization.
First, searchers tend to place the years of the Corvette first or in the prefix. Second, the model names tend to be associated after the corvette term. Third, the refinement of associated terms becomes more evident. When looking down the Suffix column, the top term is parts, followed later by parts accessories. After those very general terms, more specific ones are used—wheels, rims, and seats. Another interesting observation is the search for corvette forum, which shows a desire to share information with and learn from other Corvette owners. This is an important part of learning about your market, finding their needs, and learning their social behaviors.
Another interesting comparison is between corvette (singular) and corvettes (plural). The plural term has only the s listed in the Suffix column. This shows that the singular term is searched significantly more than the plural term. However, simply consider what the typical difference would be in the searcher’s intent. A plural search would imply a desire to see many Corvettes and maybe images, whereas a singular search would imply a desire to purchase