Identifying keywords to gear your site in optimization is an extremely important point – one that is often overlooked its proper due by clients. Tom Church, Marketing Manager for Babel Interactive, explains, using examples from Scale Manager 2, the water softener alternative:

Too many marketers in the optimization industry are willing to use gut instinct in anticipating their client’s keywords rather than sound research. But a simple process exists to ensure your keyword validity.

Take the term water softeners for instance. Such an innocuous term would be a certain winner in the water softener industry combating limescale. The first part of our framework is the social aspect of the keywords: do people really search for water softeners, or is it water conditioners? If it is water conditioners, is this term likely to lead to an actual sale, or is it a term popular for substitute products?

Keywords validity can be identified by using keyword suggestion tools that allow marketers to identify useful variations on search terms e.g. limescale descaler over water conditioners or water softeners – approaching the problem from consumer behaviour. Such tools are a remedy for ‘writer’s block’.

If the client has been running a cost-per-click campaign then we’ll have stats indicating whether water softeners or water conditioners are more important. The flexibility of such a system allows keyword to be added and removed on an hourly basis, in effect giving keywords a trial run as to their efficacy in making the cash register ring. Of course one must allow for slight expected disparities: in your market do more people examine the sponsored links on the right of the page or the natural search results on the left? The truth is that it differs from one industry to the next.

The second stage is the legality of keywords. For example, can I legally call my product a water softener or a water conditioner if it is in fact an industry recognised substitute? Perhaps not, but a clever copywriter can sidestep this contention through such literary tools as product comparisons: I might not be able to say ‘we have water softeners’, though I might well say ‘alternative to water softeners’. Therefore, no legal issues are involved, and the keyword intense copy can still give your site a reasonable chance of appearing under any searches for ‘water softeners’.

The third, and final stage, is what the competition is making of their keywords: are they interested in water softeners or water conditioners? Or are they solely limescale fanatics? Take time to examine their Meta Tags; although not so technically useful as in previous years, they are a valuable source of information. Keyword density (the number of times water softeners appear on the page/total word count) can be measured along with link checking to see how much work will have to be done in order for a client’s site to be elevated to a higher position through optimization.

So, using the above model should allow you to identify the most important keywords; and allow you to finally answer our initial question: are you a water softener, or a water conditioner?

Scale Manager 2 provides alternatives to water softeners and water conditioners which can help to prevent problems associated with hard water, such as limescale.