Getting started with SEO part 3: Finding the right keywords for your goals

After you read this post, you will know how to pick the right SEO Keywords for your website.

While there is a whole other post coming about the different broad goals Search Engine Optimization can help your business achieve, we want to point out two of the most popular for sake of this post.

Awareness through Search Engine Optimization

We had a client one time who was the head of a charitable foundation, we’ll refer to him as Joe.

“I want you to show me how to optimize a landing page for ‘free coffee,’” Joe said to us.

“But, Joe,” we replied. “Your foundation is about raising money to slow the burn of rainforests in South America. Sure, we can funnel people searching for ‘free coffee’ to a landing page on your site, but, chances are, they’re not going to be interested in your cause.”

Joe wasn’t deterred.

“They won’t at first,” Joe said. “But you get them there, and we’ll do the rest.”

See, Joe was more concerned with people being exposed to his charities message than actually taking action.

He was convinced that some people would take an interest after being exposed to their cause. And if not, that’s OK, too, because at least they will have heard of the organization.

In the end, we optimized a page that explained how, for less effort than a free cup of coffee, you could make a difference, helping the rainforest.

This is an awareness campaign, and is appropriate if you are more concerned with exposing your people to a message or a cause than actually getting them to convert on something.

Conversion through Search Optimization

Conversion campaigns are different beasts.

Let’s suppose that Joe wanted to increase his conversion percentage on visitors to donors.

“Free coffee” would be a horrible choice because you are going to attract a ton of people looking for free coffee, who probably don’t give any more of a damn than anyone else about the rainforests. In fact, this may be harmful to a conversion campaign because, if there is too strong of a call to donate, you may make your visitor feel deceived.

A brief aside: If your Marketing department has discovered that avid coffee drinkers are more likely to support charitable causes for rainforests, then ‘free coffee’ gains more credibility.

But assuming that is not the case, we’d look for Keywords that aligned more closely with our desired outcome.

“charity donations”

“donating to charities”

“rainforest charities”

“good south american charities”

People who are searching for these Keywords are closer to donating money than someone searching for “free coffee.”

Brainstorming Keywords

We illustrated those two goals because, in our experience, 95% of our clients are looking for one of these two goals, and actually, most are looking for conversions.

So, once you’ve chosen your goal, it’s time to brainstorm on your topic.

In this case our topic would be “rainforest charity.”

Sit down with your team members and ask them a question.

If your goal is awareness you are just trying to think about terms your demographic or psychographic might be searching for.

So, assuming your staff fits your market, you might ask “What are some common things you search for on Google?”

Jot them all down. If you don’t get at least 50, you’re not even trying.

Conversion is the same process, except you’ll ask your staff a question more related to your desired outcome.

“If you wanted to find a charity in which to donate money, what would you search for on Google?”

Again, jot them all down. You should have at least 25.

Now, take your topic to Google’s Keyword Tool, enter your topic and click ‘search.’

Google will brainstorm for you and generate some Keywords that it thinks are associated with that topic.

Next, take your topic and plug it into Google’s Wonderwheel, which will give you more related terms.

Finally, do the same for Google’s Related Searches.

If at this point, you don’t have a list of 100 Keywords, your topic was probably “Raising penguins in the Sahara.”

There are more tools we could use to get even more, but this is a good starting point.

Now, unless you have massive resources, you probably can’t create an optimized page for each keyword in your list.

Instead, you need to test the validity of each and come up with a list of the five to 10 best Keywords.

Fortunately, we already showed you how to do that in our post, “Should I pick this keyword for SEO?”.

Happy keywording! And if you need any help, drop us a comment below.