5.3. How to Group Your Keywords
September 5, 2008 by Andy
The strategy highlighted above talks about two types of pages, articles and main pages. There is actually a third type of page – the homepage.
These three types of page have very different functions:
a) articles – get traffic
b) main pages – sell affiliate products
c) homepage – helps direct your visitors to what they want on your site.
Let’s look at some real data, so I can better explain the differences in keyword choice for these types of pages.
My keyword research was carried out on "golf clubs", and I found 1815 phrases at Wordtracker related to this niche.
There are various ways you could approach this site, but I think a good strategy would be to have main pages that target the popular manufacturers of golf clubs.
The articles could then be reviews of different golf clubs, help and tips on choosing golf clubs, even golfing tips would be relevant.
Let’s consider the main pages first.
For all of my keyword sorting, filtering, grouping and selecting, I will be using Keyword Results Analyzer (KRA).
Wordtracker emails are quite difficult to handle unless you are a spreadsheet wizard. I developed Keyword Results Analyzer to help. This tool will import your Wordtracker email and make it very easy to sort, filter and group your keywords, plus it does most of the work of grouping phrases for you.
I know I developed it, and I know I make money when someone buys it, so you have every right to think I am stringing you a line just to get a sale, but…
Keyword Results Analyzer is the most used tool in my SEO toolkit and the toolkit of many SEO professionals.
I think you will quickly see why as we work with our keyword list in the next few chapters. However, by all means work with your spreadsheet software it you prefer. I wont be able to help you with some of the stuff as I don’t know how to do what KRA does using a spreadsheet program.
After importing my Golf Club Wordtracker email, KRA displays a list of all phrases and their corresponding data:
The technique I use to find the main pages is simple. Sort the phrases according to Count, with highest count at the top. 99.9% of the time, this allows you to quickly map out the main pages of your site.
Here is what the top results look like:
Once you have ordered your keywords by count, go down the list, and select several phrases that "encompass" your niche.
In my example, I am looking for makes of golf clubs.
The 7th most searched for phrase is:
"golf club reviews" with 138 searches a day at Google. While it is not the make of a golf club (therefore not suitable as a main page of my site), it would make an excellent phrase to target for my homepage considering the types of articles I discussed writing earlier.
Here are the top makes that people are actually searching for (data is number of searches at Google every day, and competing pages):
125 153000 callaway golf clubs
92 43800 ping golf clubs
49 43600 cleveland golf clubs
39 22500 nike golf clubs
39 17700 cobra golf clubs
37 54800 adams golf clubs
33 32200 mizuno golf clubs
33 61400 wilson golf clubs
As you can see, these phrases have high competition. This backs up the point I made earlier that the phrases targeted by main pages usually have high competition because of their nature (they are searched for a lot).
Trying to compete for any of these terms is going to involve a lot of off-page optimization (months of work). That is the reason our strategy uses lower competition phrases in articles, to drive traffic to these pages.
We have easily identified the main pages of our Golf Club site. What we need to do next, is to write the main pages, pre-selling our visitors into loosening the strings on their wallets. However, to complicate things further, we need to theme each page so that the search engines are left in no doubt about the topic of our page. This themeing will help your page get found for a variety of phrases related to the main phrase.
Sounds complicated, doesn’t it?
Using KRA, it’s not, but we will look at that when the time is right.
In this section we have seen how to select primary keywords for our main pages. In the next section we will look at how we select keywords for articles.
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