How I Do Keyword Research for SEO

There are probably 500 other good posts on the topic of keyword research and keyword analysis.  But here’s how I do it.

This post was prompted by a discussion of how to improve the rank of skipmoen.com, so here’s some…

Background

Skip Moen writes a daily devotional that looks at one word of scripture each day, focusing on the original Hebrew or Greek text and what it likely meant to the original audience who would have read it 2000 or more years ago.  Each day, approximately 600 people receive something like this via email:

All of these 600 people made a donation of some sort (as little as $1, as much as $10,000) to Skip’s non-profit ministry, At God’s Table.  The bulk of the donations go directly to back to those in his Today’s Word community and numerous other charities around the world.

Skip is a close friend of mine.  I helped him put this system into place using WordPress, Mailchimp, PayPal, and some secure web hosting generously donated by my good friends at Firehost.

It’s important to note that SkipMoen.com is already ranked #1 for the site’s most important keyword phrase: “Skip Moen”  (Someone searching for “Skip Moen” knows exactly what they are looking for, and the first result is thankfully, SkipMoen.com.  Perfect. 

But how does Skip grow his readership by ways other than word-of-mouth / Forward-To-A-Friend?

He needs to start ranking for generic phrases that are relevant to his content.  Which leads me to How I Do Keyword Research For SEO…

Step 1) What Do I Offer That Is Being Searched For Generically?

Some phrases that immediately come to mind for SkipMoen.com are “Bible studies” and “daily devotionals”.

I use Google’s Keyword Analysis tool to search both those phrases.  It shows me derivatives and the number of searches each month for each phrase.  This helps me gauge which phrase I want to target.

Step 2) Analyze The Phrases

Sorting by keyword phrases with the most traffic, my instinct is that SkipMoen.com is not a great landing site for “study bible”, “devotional”, or even “bible verses”.

I spend about 15 minutes going through the list and decide to search google for “daily devotionals” to see what other sites are listed.

Looks like we’re in the right place.  But, my gut tells me that this phrase has a lot of competition and the top 3 sites likely have many, many inbound links.  Therefore, my likelihood of being able to displace them is very, very low.  So it’s time to look at the keyword list again.

Step 3) The Goal Is To Pick One Phrase

I’m finding picking just one phrase to be difficult as I scroll through over 300 keyword suggestions.  It helps me to take a step back and reflect on what makes SkipMoen.com special…

Skip has built his teaching around what should be an obvious insight: The Bible, both Old & New Testament, is a thoroughly Jewish document written by Jewish authors, primarily to a Jewish audience, who lived in a 1st century Jewish culture.  When we study the Bible, we must first attempt to understand what the original language would have meant to the original audience before attempting to apply it to ourselves in today’s culture. Therefore, when Skip analyzes Greek words found in the New Testament, he looks for their Hebrew equivalent.

So maybe “hebrew word study” is a better phrase?  Here’s the traffic and search engine results:

These sites are VERY similar to SkipMoen.com.  In fact, I know that Skip uses BlueLetterBible.org and recommends products from Hebrew4Christians.com.  So someone searching for “hebrew word study” is VERY likely to want what SkipMoen.com has to offer.

You see, it’s not about raw traffic, it’s about ranking for the right traffic.

Step 3b) Test Your Idea Using Adwords

At this point, it would probably be a good idea to validate my assumption that “hebrew word study” traffic results in new subscribers.  To do this, I would run a few Google Adwords campaigns.  But measuring conversion could be difficult, and quite frankly, I feel like skipping this step right now. 

Step 4) Modify The Page

This is where I’m going to resist the urge to go after both “Hebrew Word Study” and “Daily Devotionals”.  I may eventually add “Daily Devotionals”, but first I want to see if I can get to #1, #2, or #3 for “Hebrew Word Study”.

Following my 5 steps to SEO Dominance, I change:

1. The name of the blog, which changed the title of the page (and all pages throughout the site).
2. The name of the page, which changed the very important <h1> tag.
3. And I sprinkled in a few different variations of “Hebrew Word Studies” on the homepage copy.

Here’s my before and after:

Step 4) Begin Tracking My Results Using Authority Labs

Now that I’ve got the most important on-page optimization changes done, I start tracking the domain and several other relevant keywords in my favorite website ranking reports tool, AuthorityLabs.  (Note: It’ll populate Global Volume and Ranking data by tomorrow.)

Step 5) Start Getting Inbound Links

Ultimately, it’s important for SkipMoen.com to receive inbound links with the phrase “Hebrew Word Study“…which is what I just did.  But inbound link building is no trivial task.

I’ve been experimenting with five different types of inbound link techniques for various sites.  It’s been time-consuming and expensive.  But the lessons learned have been very valuable.  I’ll save those for a future post when I feel like I’m on stronger, more authoritative footing.

Update

After posting this, my buddy John Thorman, who originally asked this question, replied back with two questions of his own:

Question 1) Patrick, I noticed you used the plural on the site but your example was with the singular.  Does that matter?

I know that G’s results take into account plural and singular and you can optimize for both.  But I searched both and the obvious winner is the singular.  And I’m not sure exactly how G does this.  So…I went back and changed the site to optimize for the singular, just in case.

Question 2) Patrick, why not optimize for “bible study lessons” since it has 49,500 searches a month.

Let’s run through some numbers that I forgot to include because I skipped over analyzing backlinks, which is a measure of competitiveness.  I use the not-free “backlink analyzer” tool from SEOmoz.org. 

Here’s the backlinks for the #1 and #2 site for “bible study lessons”

Number 1 is really strong on that exact anchor text.  Very difficult to displace.  But #2 looks like it could be conquered, but only after getting at least 20 decent links with that anchor text.  And that’s not trivial.

Compare that to the backlinks for the #1 and #2 sites for “Hebrew word study”.  Both have a ton of inbound links, but none that explicitly say, “Hebrew word study”.

This tells me we’ve got a good chance to get to the #1 ranking.

It also tells me there are 6600 people per month searching for Hebrew Word Studies, and if they click the first two links, they are going to pages that have weak relevance.

Which means, we should be able to get our homepage up to #1 for that phrase easier than breaking into the top #3 of “bible study lessons”.

What Percentage Of Searchers Click On The #1 Googe Link?

I pulled this screenshot from a presentation by Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz.  I’m not sure where he got it, but he’s smarter than me at this stuff, and he did draw it, so I’ll use it.

Essentially, 70% of all clicks go to the first 4 positions.

So getting to #1 for “hebrew word study” = 2772 visits per month (42% of 6600)

Versus, getting to #3 for “bible study lessons” = 3960 visits per month (8% of 49,500)

“Bible study lessons” visits could yield about 40% more traffic.  But, I estimate the competition to be much more difficult to get into #3 spot than #1 for “hebrew word study”.

Secondly, a “hebrew word study” visitor is more likely to be at home on SkipMoen.com than a “bible study lessons” visitor.

This is where it be good to revisit step 3b and do some PPC testing I guess.  More to come…

Your Comments Welcome!

Which would you choose?  Please leave a comment and help me figure this out.  Cheers

Update

I haven’t looked at this in like a year, but I decided to check the results.  SkipMoen.com has been ranking in the top 5 on G for “hebrew word studies” for the past 6 months.

Mission semi-accomplished.  The real question is, do those searchers do anything?

Well, according the the Analytics snapshot for the past 30 days, google.com is only the 5th highest referrer, and none of the keyword search terms are “hebrew word study.”

Meanwhile, Facebook sends ~6 times the amount of traffic than google.com.  (That’s likely to be friends sharing Today’s Word on their wall, and their friends finding it interesting, and clicking through to read the whole article.)

Which leads me to my next point, would everyone please STFU about SEO and focus more on “persuasive momentum” — that being, create an insanely great “product” that consumers will love so much, they’ll share / recommend it to their friends.

Btw, please read my update to the end of this post regarding my experience with ThinkBigSites where I decided to stop chasing the golden goose.