Identifying and developing your keywords

Because keywords play such an important foundational role in the development of your search strategy, you will obviously want to spend a good deal of thought and effort developing solid keywords.

Developing your keyword list has several phases:

At the start of your keyword research, you will want to develop a keyword matrix. A keyword matrix is a simple data set based upon all the keywords you think might have value.

Your keyword matrix should be organized as follows: you should have a row entry for each potential keyword, with the keyword in the left column. In the next row, you will record the reported monthly or daily search volume for that specific keyword. Later in this chapter, we will learn how to get keyword volumes for particular terms. In the following column you will assign a relevance score to the keyword between zero and 100. The relevance score is a numerical measurement of how valuable that keyword phrase will be to your business.

Let's examine how relevance scores are calculated. A high-relevance search term is a search term for which the commercial intent of the searcher is a sure match for your products or services. Let's examine the figure below showing a keyword matrix to illustrate how to come up with a relevance score. The keyword "plastic surgery Austin Texas" is assigned a relevance score of 100. For a plastic surgery practitioner in Austin Texas, that search phrase is perfectly relevant to the services they are offering. However, the relevance score for "Plastic surgery Texas" is only 20 percent. That is because this key term is much less desirable and only about 20 percent of those Internet searchers would be potential customers. The other 80 percent are looking for something else: someone searching for "Plastic surgery Texas" might be looking for a plastic surgeon in Austin, but they might be looking in another part of the state. Thus, the search phrase "Plastic surgery Texas" isn't highly relevant to an Austin surgeon. Likewise, an Internet user searching for "Bad plastic surgery photos" might not even be searching for a service at all. The intent of that search phrase seems to imply someone seeking some entertainment value. The relevance score should reflect your best estimate of what percentage of the search volume represents actual potential customers.

We then use the relevance score to arrive at a weighted value for a given search term. The weighted value for a search term is the search volume for a given term multiplied by the relevance percentage to arrive at an adjusted number of monthly searches. This adjusted number represents the real value of the search term. And so, in our example, the search phrase "Bad plastic surgery photos" has strong search volume: 230 monthly searches. However, at such a low relevance score of 10 percent (which might even be generous), this phrase has a weighted value of only 23 searches. On the other hand, the phrase "Austin plastic surgery" is perfectly relevant and yields a weighted value of 190 searches. This phrase is clearly the most valuable search phrase in the keyword matrix shown.

The following table shows a keyword matrix with monthly search counts for particular keywords as well as value weighting based on relevance. You can use a keyword matrix to analyze your keyword list to prioritize the truly valuable keywords.