Keyword research is the heart of internet marketing.
It’s almost always a keyword phrase – several words in a specific order – rather than individual words because it’s rarely possible for a single word to convey the intent of what you’re searching for.
There are occasional exceptions and they’re usually short lived. For instance, when Hurricane Katrina hit the headlines in 2005 you could search for that one word and relevant results would show up.
It still shows at the top of the results for a search for Katrina but there’s now Google’s equivalent of a disambiguation page: the top three results currently are for the hurricane itself, a Wikipedia disambiguation page and an actress called Katrina Kaif:
Part of the reason for that change in the results is that Google has a freshness factor in its algorithm which allows its computers to include certain results whilst that news is popular and then downplay them again once people lose interest.
But normally you’d need to add a qualifying word (so you’d search for hurricane katrina or whichever other hurricane you were interested in) to get more relevant results.
This applies to almost every keyword you’re likely to be targeting – you need several words to make up a keyword phrase.
It used to be the case that you needed to target an exact phrase in order to rank for it but Google now uses something called latent semantic indexing (LSI) to include synonyms in the search results. So when I searched for hurricane arthur (which I found on a Wikipedia page when I was researching this article) the top result was for Tropical Storm Arthur (2008).
That means that Google “knows” that a hurricane can also be called a tropical storm.
Interestingly, although that storm name goes back 8 years, it’s about to be re-used. And there was a news article that talked about storm names on the first page of the search results.
As a general rule, the shorter the keyword phrase, the more difficult it will be to rank high in the search results.
That’s because there are more pages competing for that search term – either deliberately or just because the word is included on the page.
So, in theory, this article is competing for the word hurricane.
But, in practice, it’s not. I’m just using it as an example and the page will get counted in with the 43 million other pages that include the word or the almost 11 million pages that include hurricane arthur either as a phrase or scattered somewhere on the page.
How Google interprets people’s searches
It’s important to have at least a bit of knowledge as to how Google interprets the searches people type in.
Whilst there are around 200 factors involved in ranking a web page, some are more important than others.
You’ll know from your own searches that the words you typed in are bolded in the search results. It often also bolds LSI words – lose weight and losing weight are usually bolded in a search for weight loss – so if your page is considered good enough, it can get included in the search results even if you’re not targeting the precise phrase that was searched for.
That’s important to remember when you’re targeting longer keyword phrases as far fewer people are optimising their pages for those phrases and Google is clutching at straws for even half way decent results to show on the first page.
In theory, putting quote marks around the phrase you’re searching for tells Google that you’re looking for that precise page with all those words in the order you’ve typed – that’s often quoted as being a way to find out how many other pages you’re competing with for any given phrase.
In practice, that’s not always true. It depends on the phrase as you can tell from this search:
The top two results don’t have the phrase I searched for anywhere on the page. Which means the figure of 556 results is wrong.
And if you click through to page 2 of the results, you get this message:
In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 13 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.
Clicking on the option to repeat the search still brings back 13 results.
Which is another important lesson in keyword research – just because a computer shows you a figure doesn’t mean that figure is even vaguely accurate.
By any stretch of the imagination, 13 is a lot less than 556.
And once this page is indexed, the total is likely to go up by one, even though I’m not targeting that phrase on this page, I’m just including it as an example.
As a general rule, weight loss is a competitive niche and difficult to get ranked for. I chose that phrase as an example because it came up in the suggestions as I typed and narrowed down my search – more about doing that soon – but it didn’t show up on the first page of suggestions in the Keyword Planner, which is probably why it’s not being targeted.
What this means is that keyword research isn’t a precise science.
But you can get enough clues from a variety of places to make sure that you’re going in the right direction.
That said, if you get your target keywords wrong, you’re at an immediate disadvantage in the search results.
Too broad and you’re competing with millions of pages, lots of which are from stronger sites than yours.
Plus you’re probably not targeting your real customers.
Too narrow and you can get to the top of the results quite fast but there are only a handful of searches a year.
Pre-research keyword research
You’ve probably heard the phrase “garbage in, garbage out”.
That is very true for keyword research.
Regardless of the keyword tool you use, if you give it the wrong instructions in the first place you won’t get meaningful results back.
If you know your niche well, you may be able to this on your own.