Keyword Analysis and Search Engine Marketing
Tips for Bloggers and Niche Marketers
This is part 4 of my series on Comprehensive Keyword Research for Bloggers - if you’ve joined us part way through, you can find the start of this series here: Defining Keyword Research Goals.
Today I’m going to cover Keyword Themes and Grouping - depending on how your setup there could be quite a bit of work involved, but we have two main goals that we need to work towards:
Information overload can be a real problem with Keyword Analysis projects – it’s likely that your research will identify tens of thousands of keywords… so managing and maintaining them becomes a critical process in effective keyword research.
In the previous article, I covered Query Types and Keyword Intent, this is one of the ways I group my keywords and an essential start to getting value from your research, but we still need to organise things a little better..
When making these lists, it is perfectly acceptable for a keyword to appear in more than one list, so don’t worry if you start to double up in places, we want to make this process as easy as possible.
The first list that I usually make is based around products / brands / People… you’ll need to use a spreadsheet program (Google Docs has a good free browser based option) it’s a matter of digging through your keyword list and copy/pasting everything with a specific brand, person or product keyword into a new spreadsheet page. There maybe a bit of overlap with your keyword intent analysis, but these highly specific keywords are usually some of the most important ones you’ll need to reference, so having a handy list of them will save you plenty of time later. Depending on your niche and how many keywords you have in this list, you may want to further categorise them as you see fit.
The next list that I like to create is a location based list - every keyword that contains a city, country, region or landmark - copy it into a new page on your spreadsheet.
Finally, I like to compile lists of my main keyword themes… identifying these can be a little subjective, you’ll need to look through your lists and find common keywords that have enough depth to them and make valid niches for you to focus on. You’ll need to make a list of all keyphrases that contain your theme keywords (eg. if your theme keyword is ‘rss feed’, you’ll want to include things like ‘rss news feed’, ’sports rss feed’ etc.).
Ok, I’ll admit - that last list in particular can be a real time sink - the more themes you identify, and the bigger your master keyword list is… the longer this task is going to take, so here’s a couple of tips to help make your life a bit easier:
Now that we have our lists… it’s time to start doing some analysis.
Keyword Usage Patterns should form an important part of your overall strategy. Primarily looking at your products / brands / people and location based lists, we want to determine keyword order for common keyphrase themes (eg. do the majority of searches appear as ‘keyword location’, or ‘location keyword’). Use this information to structure the majority of your keywords in page titles, content and link text.
I like to look at Keyword Modifiers in two groups, the first are synonyms.
I’ve seen Google experimenting with highlighting synonyms in regular search results recently (don’t seem to be doing it right now, but you can still see the effect when preceeding your keyword with ~, eg. ~buy ipod). Using synonyms is a great way to build up some additional relevance to a theme without overstuffing your main keyword phrase and adding a little variety for your readers. As you can see from the screenshot below, google highlights words such as ’store’, ‘buying’, ‘purchase’ and ’sale’ as synonyms for ‘Buy” (perhaps ‘related’ is a better term for Google’s approach?). Adding some variety to your keyword use can help make your page look more natural and keep you on theme.
The second group of keyword modifiers you’ll want to look at are different ways of describing subjects relating to your keyword… rather than go into it in detail, Ann Smarty posted an excellent article on SearchEngineJournal.com recently, titled How to Organize your Keyword Modifiers to Create Long Tail Strategy - it covers this in great detail, so head over there and check out what she has to say.
That’s enough for today… I do have one more list of keywords to create (or more precisely questions), but I’ll cover that in the next part of the series where we’ll look at Questions and Answers your readers want to know.
Thanks again for reading, looking forward to seeing your comments and if you enjoyed this article don’t forget to bookmark it at your favourite social media site… I’d appreciate it 
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