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Generating great keywords is a vital skill for any Search Engine Optimization (SEO) company.  It’s the first piece of the whole chain of events that leads to your listing showing up as the end result.  So how do you decide which keywords to choose for website?

The answer; some good research and some good judgement.  “Judgement you say”, where does judgement come into it?  I’ll illustrate it with an example.

I was reading one of the many forums I frequent, looking for people to help, future customers, that kind of thing.  I read a post from a lady who works for a reasonbly large business and is something important in marketing for this company.

Her questions was relating to choosing keywords.  Before I go into the story, I need to explain a couple of terms I’ll use.  The first is “impressions” and it’s the term used to describe when your advert or listing has appeared in a person search results i.e. has someone had the potential to see your advert or listing.

The second term is “clicks” which is used to describe someone actually clicking on an advert or listing which then takes them through to a website, usually their own.

Now, the lady in question was obviously trying to research keywords using data given on the number of impressions and clicks given for a range of keywords.  Wow, don’t I sound really techy and geeky.  Ok, let’s try it again.  Said lady had looked up some keywords (how I don’t know) and in looking up these keywords she had some information which told her the number of times the keyword has appeared in search results and the number of times people had then clicked through to the website.

So, she was stating that obviously it made sense to consider the number of “clicks” as important and wanted to know if she should also be considering the number of impressions.

When I read her post, I thought it was quite an interesting dilemma.  Clicks or impressions or both or neither?  Hmm decisions decisions!

Ok, so my take on her dilemma.  Impressions are simply the number of times a keyword has appeared in search results. That’s it.  The information doesn’t tell you how many customers bought products using that keyword.  It doesn’t tell you the average sales generated from that keyword. It simply tells you how many times it appeared in the results for a search.  It doesn’t even tell you if someone’s eyes actually looked at all the listings on the page.

What it does tell you is the potential visibility that the keyword may have and only the potential.  As an analogy; if I were a fisherman and I cast a huge net in between two boats and drove forward in the hope of scooping up lots of fish I should have a pretty good chance of coming up trumps.  Except, how do I know I’m where the fish are?  How do I know that these fish are the best ones?  How do I know that the holes in my net aren’t too big and I risk losing fish.

All I really know is that I have a net and that some of the fish are hopefully going to end up in the net.  Reality is, there is lots of experience, research and judgement that goes into getting all these things right so that I catch exactly the right type and size of fish.

This is similar to impressions,  it’s showing you a big net, but not how accurate, targeted or focused the net and catch will be. They just tell you the potential passing traffic.

So what use are clicks?  Clicks are obviously a bit more accurate because they show that someone has actually taken the time to click on a listing or ad.  But again, that’s it.  They don’t tell you how many of those clicks turned into paying customers, nor do they show how much people spent or how long someone spent on a site once they’d clicked through.  So an analogy again.

I’ve now deciding to be more targeted with my fishing.  I by myself a rod, get some bait and go fishing.  Surely this should yield the right type of fish?  But how do I know if I have the right type of rod or bait.  If the fish come and take a look at the bait but don’t like it, I lose my fish.

This is what clicks are, people coming to take a look, but it doesn’t mean they’re going to bite.

So how useful are these in keyword identification.  Honestly, they are useful to help you hone your initial list of possibilities but other than that they are broad estimates of potential traffic and customers and not a lot more.

If you really want to get some good keywords, I’d suggest you go looking at your most successful competitors and harvest their sites for they keywords they are using.  Interrogate thier titles, headings, bold text, hyperlinks and you’ll soon get an indication of what words they are targeting.

Do this for about five or so of your competitors and you’ll be getting a competitive based list of keywords.  If your competitors are successful with them, why shouldn’t they work for you.

But, and this is a big but.  All the fabulous keywords in the world won’t turn your potential traffic into customers if your site content is naff.  So, when you’re analysing your competitors sites, look at their content too.  See how they write it and how they get their sales message across.  Look for the “call to action” and the “unique sales proposition”.

Keywords don’t sell things, great content on great sites do!