The Importance of Search Term Research

One of the most important areas of an effective search engine optimisation campaign is the selection of the search terms that you need to focus on when applying the campaign to a website.

So, what are search terms? They are what make up your websites identity within the search engines. A simple example can be something like “shoes”, a site that sells shoes, or does reviews on certain runners would choose such a keyword. The problem with this keyword is it is far too broad, enter in the word shoes into a search engine and you will be presented with a wide variety of sites that refer to shoes in many different manners i.e. shoe manufacturers, shoe stores, history of shoes etc further more your site will be lost in the mix of millions of other sites that are using the same keyword.

What we need to do is focus on more detailed terms; they need to directly relate to your business, for this example we will assume you are selling fashion shoes and based in Melbourne. Thus a better term to focus on would be “fashion shoes” entering this search term into a search engine drills further down into the previously diluted results and returns sites that specifically relate to fashion shoes, though more specific, still very broad, lets drill down a little further!

We want to attract people that want to buy fashion shoes! Enter in “buy fashion shoes” now we are starting to get a much more targeted list of results, the more specific we are the better the results become. Finally enter in buy men’s fashion shoes Melbourne these results are much more refined and (depending on the engine) you are able to locate a specific site / store that sells men’s fashion shoes in Melbourne.

Not only does this provide you with a good list of sites, it will also help pre-qualify the searcher. When attracting traffic to your site you want to ensure that the traffic arriving already know what they are looking for e.g. they want to buy men’s fashion shoes. There is no point trying to compete for traffic on a broad search term such as shoes. The results are much more diluted and it is much harder to achieve a good position in these results!

So when selecting the keywords that you want to use when optimising your website for search traffic be sure to consider this theory.

Another important element to selecting keywords and search terms for your SEO campaign is making sure people are using such words. There is very little benefit in optimising your site for a niche search term that people are simply not going to use, sure you will perform well in the search engines, possibly achieving the top position though is this going to generate traffic? NO.

There are many great tools available that can help you gain a greater understanding of how and what people are searching for. Overture offer a free search term suggestion tool that gives you the ability to see what terms people are using within their search network around the globe.

So, when selecting search terms for your website there are a number of things to remember: