Jon McCulloch

Keyword optim­isa­tion is per­haps the most import­ant yet most poorly under­stood ele­ment of SEO. But it’s no black art and any half-decent dir­ect response copy­writer should grok it immediately.

I don’t know about you, but I’m heart­ily sick of see­ing out­rageous claims by people selling Internet Marketing inform­a­tion, strategies, tips and tech­niques propped up by a few very rare and excep­tional successes.

In real­ity, though, while it takes a lot more work than the sellers of this inform­a­tion like to admit, it’s actu­ally very easy in prin­ciple – and most of the prob­lems come from our old friend the 80/20 rule (and they’re only prob­lems because we ignore the 80/20 rule, I hasten to add).

Fact is, most people make three huge mis­takes when they try to improve their nat­ural search engine rankings.

• First, they go for the wrong keywords entirely (as in, they’re not focused enough).
• Secondly, they go for the right keywords (in a sense) but don’t under­stand it’s not enough just to dom­in­ate rank­ings for the most pop­u­lar keyword in their niche.
• And thirdly, they often try keyword optim­isa­tion in too com­pet­it­ive a mar­ket without what we might call “rank­ing collateral”.

So, first off – the wrong keywords.

As you know I live in Ireland. If I mosey on along to google.ie and type in, say, “pho­to­graphy Galway”, on the right-hand side I get loads of res­ults, some of which are actu­ally from pho­to­graph­ers in Dublin.

Yes, these are Adwords (which people are pay­ing money for) from pho­to­graph­ers in Dublin who are pop­ping up when someone is look­ing for a pho­to­grapher in Galway.

Now, I don’t know whether you know Ireland or not, but believe me when I say you wouldn’t want to drive from Dublin to Galway just for some mug­shots. Some people would, but the vast major­ity won’t. So a Dublin pho­to­grapher advert­ising to the people of Galway is a waste of time, effort and money.

OK, so you might say, “But, you short, bald iras­cible git, this is Adwords not SEO!”.

True. But I don’t care – the same prin­ciple applies. Business own­ers do their keyword optim­isa­tion for too broad a cat­egory – say, “pho­to­graphy” rather than “pho­to­graphy galway”.

Not only will the first gen­er­ate you many spuri­ous enquir­ies, but it’s also much harder to rank for.

Thirdly (yes, I’ve skipped ahead – I’ll do No.2 in a minute, because it’s the most inter­est­ing, the most valu­able, and the least well under­stood by the plebs), they go for the big fish without the proper bait or the right equipment.

OK, that’s a crap (or “carp”) meta­phor. But what I mean is, they might go straight for “pho­to­graphy”, which returns 54 mil­lion res­ults rather than, say, “gal­way pho­to­grapher” which returns only 201,000.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out keyword optim­isa­tion to get you into the top 10 with 201,000 com­pet­it­ors is much easier than doing it with 54 mil­lion com­pet­it­ors, does it?

And this is related to the second point: why it’s not always best to aim for pop­u­lar keywords. Or, to put it another way, rank­ing highly for keywords with high search volumes might get you a lot of traffic, but might not make you a lot of money.

There are a few reas­ons for this, but I’m going to cover just one of them now (the oth­ers are worthy of a post in themselves).

It’s to do with what you might call buy­ing tem­per­at­ure. Someone search­ing for “pho­to­graphy” could be after any­thing to do with the sub­ject – books, gal­ler­ies, cam­eras or, as a pho­to­grapher might hope, a photographer.

But someone search­ing for “gal­way wed­ding pho­to­grapher” is most likely at least think­ing about someone to take pho­tos at his or her wed­ding, cor­rect? That’s why with your keyword optim­isa­tion you’re often best to tar­get the so-called long-tailed keywords. Not only are they easier to rank for, but the lower search volume is often com­pensated for by their buy­ing temperature

Now, you’ll find this theme – niches – crop­ping up all over the place and any mar­keter or dir­ect response copy­writer worth his salt will under­stand it in a trice.

Y’see, the Internet, SEO, Social Marketing and all this other new-fangled stuff calls for a dif­fer­ence only in style not substance.

There are a lot of people get­ting rich out there selling “secrets” which are noth­ing of the sort and are really just sens­ible obser­va­tions and “nich­ing” on very famil­iar and for­mu­laic strategies that have been around since year dot.