Approach to Keyword Research for SEO

Hi Learners,

Welcome back to Analogue to AI. In our previous posts, we went through a step-by-step process that helps us get started with SEO for our websites. Lets continue from where we left off.

Keyword Research for SEO

Keyword research is an integral part of your SEO plan. It essentially means identifying the final set of keywords you want to rank for. If you are a rookie, someone who is absolutely new to SEO, you should know that Keyword Research is not a defined process. Every SEO expert will have their own methods. No method is right or wrong. The best method is the one that brings you results & the one that works for your website. The goal of your SEO plan is the rank on Search Engines like Google for a certain set of keywords, themes, topics & conversations that are important to your business & have the potential to drive profitable business for your company. 

Understanding Google

Since Google is a leader in search engine traffic (its an open secret) we will consider Google as a benchmark and centre of our SEO conversations. It makes a lot of sense to understand How Google search works. Lets revisit the way Google Ranks website. If you haven't watched it yet, its a good idea to do so now. Watch the vide below to get a basic understanding.

You can learn more about Google's ranking philosophy by visiting the Inside Google Search page. If you find it interesting and want to dive deeper into Google's algorithm, visit Google's How Search Works section.

Understanding basic SEO terminologies

Before getting started, its a good idea to understand the standard terminologies used globally by SEOs. There are hundreds of pages out there with elaborate number of terms. However if you want to get started, you can access the terminologies here

Getting Started with Keyword Research

Now that you understand Google's ranking algorithm & basic SEO terminology, lets get you started with a fine-print on keyword research. Keyword research should be undertaken separately for the Home Page & inner pages. Every page has its own content, context & intent. Every page is competing with other pages on Google on 3 broad factors.

1. Keyword Relevancy - Google will first rank pages that are relevant to the keyword that was searched on Google search engine. This means that google will need hints that your page has valuable information & content that the user is searching for
2. Credibility - Google will next rank pages based on credibility signals of your page. Stuff like high quality outbound links, Mark of certification, awards, positive reviews & comments, etc.
3. Popularity - Google evaluates the shareable value of your pages based on instances where people have spoken good about your page outside of your website. Either on social networks, review sites, portals and many different types of pages across the internet. It also looks at various ways you allow your users to share the pages they love on your website.

This is the reason you want to be thoughtful about the keywords. you want to rank for.

 Keyword Matrix

Lets say you are a certified SEO expert from Mumbai, and you want to get qualified leads to your SEO consulting business. If you look at the above graph, the size of the arrow determines the potential of the keyword to drive qualified leads to your business. This means, a term that is very generic might not be a good fit for you even if it gets searched a lot on Google. What you need is a healthy mix of keywords that are relevant as well as profitable to your business. The length of the search term and the possible context of these terms determine them as either a Short Tail keyword or a Long tail keyword. 

Short Tail keyword

In the above scenario, ranking for a term like "SEO" might not be good for your business though it might bring lots of traffic to your website but it will not convert into leads. This is because it could imply anything (SEO agency, SEO books, SEO tools, etc) not necessarily your business. In general scenarios a term like that would be a Short Tail keyword.

Long Tail keyword

Ranking for a keyword like "Certified SEO Expert Mumbai" might actually be great for your business. It is as specific as it could get for you. It has a clear intent & the potential of this keyword to drive qualified leads is very high. Hence a specific keyword term like that would be called Long Tail Keyword.

My Recommendations

For interesting reads on this topic below are a few recommended books that would add value to your learning. A free kindle version of these books is available on Amazon. Check these out.

    

Hope you enjoyed todays post. Come back to read the next post to learn hands-on how to create & evaluate keyword lists & using tools to determine keywords that are best suited for your business.

Share this post with people who you think might benefit from it.

See you all soon.

Happy learning.

Mitul Shingadia

SEO - How to look at a website from an optimisation perspective - Part 2

Hey Learners,

Welcome back. Continuing from the previous post about "How to look at a site from an optimisation perspective", we covered the importance of knowing about the business, industry & the website you are working on, the set of actions you want your users to take while they are on your website while dividing them into two categories (Primary & Secondary Goals). If you have missed, you can read about these steps here.

3. List down priority URLs of the website.

You want to list down all the important pages of your website on a sheet that require SEO. In the process of doing so, you also want to observe the URL structure or schema of your websites. For e.g. the Home Page URL could be www.example.com/home.aspx OR www.example.com.html OR www.example.com/. Take into consideration the site wide URLs too. For e.g. for category pages does your site have a URL like www.example.com/category/sub-category.html OR a vague URL like www.example.com/catid=3749.html

Pro-tip - Compare industry benchmark websites & their URL schemas too.

4. List down all the links that are pointing to your website & you are pointing too.

There are so many websites that you could send your visitors too. These include your official Social media pages, partner websites, blogger sites, network sites, ad partners, sub domain sites, e-commerce stores, Online payment gateways & wallets, copyright sites, order-tracking sites, etc. Make note of the quality of sites your website is linked to & ensure these are genuine pages. These links should not hit a dead-end and should be serving content which complements your business.

5. List down Entry-Exit pages, CTA (Call-to-Action) & forms on your website

Your users may land on your site through various sources & possibly on various pages. When they land on these pages, they should be led to a certain valuable action through Call to Action Buttons & eventually your site should be able to capture necessary data through forms, Call-outs, and other important fields.

6. Identify the navigation options available on your website to reach these important pages.

Your important business pages should be easily found on your website. These could be through strategies like a search box, Sitemaps, Home page links or the navigation menus on your site for your products.

With the steps mentioned in the last two posts, you are in a great position to get started with SEO for tour website. In our coming post, we will focus on how to define a set of keywords to rank for your website pages. Hope you enjoyed the post. Be sure to share this far and wide to let more people know about SEO.

Keep coming back to this space for our next post.

Have a great day.

Happy learning.

Mitul Shingadia

SEO - How to look at a site from an optimisation perspective.

Hi Learners,

Thankyou for coming back to this blog. In our previous post we have highlighted why a website needs SEO. If you missed it, you can check them out here. In todays post we will discuss various steps that you can take to get started with SEO for your new website or an existing website of a client, friend or the company you work for.

There are 2 important skills that will define your success with SEO.

1. Your understanding of the business you are working on. This will include everything, right from what does the business do, whom does it serve, how it makes money & eventually how are people using the website.
2. Your ability to define what keywords to rank for and what keywords will give you maximum business. We will call it Keyword Research for SEO.

Lets start with an example website and an excel sheet.

Know the Business

1. On the excel sheet, write down the name of the website you are working on along with the URL of that website. For the ease of understanding we will refer to a very simple but effective website of a resort called Cidade De Goa.
2. Visit the site and see what is the business about. On the excel sheet, write down your understanding of the business. Ask questions like what does the business do? Whom does it serve? Is location important to this business? if yes where is it located? What is the price of the product? How does the selling happen? and many such important questions that will educate you about the website & eventually the business.

The key here is to get as much information about the website, the business & the products it is selling as possible. 

Know the website

1. List down the Primary & Secondary actionable GOALS of the website. 

This means as you navigate through the website, your users will click on various sections of the website and eventually complete an action. These actions should be grouped into 2 categories - Primary & Secondary Goals.

Primary Goals - The ones that give direct business through the website to the brand (Book Now, Buy Now, Add to Cart, Download etc)

Secondary Goals are the ones which signal engagement of the users to the brand. These actions might not result in immediate business, but have the potential to get more business in the future. (Newsletter Sign-up, Social connect / Share buttons, Save / Favourite buttons, live chat, register, etc)

2. Understand the UI & the UX

Understanding how people use your website is a priority for marketers. Its important to learn about the steps people take to complete the goals of the website. This is a crucial step for developing a business focussed SEO Plan. 

User Interface or UI - This refers to all the components of a physical website ranging from apps used to create the sites, widgets, live chat APIs, form builders, sliders, drop-downs, Click-to-call buttons, Image projections, other supporting software, etc

User Experience or UX - Refers to all components that relate to adding the usability of the site. These can include stuff like page speeds, design & navigation, user interaction, pop-ups, content spread, images, videos, 

Pro-tip* : Try to complete each action by yourself on desktop & on mobile. See how the users complete it and where they are stuck, where is the experience awesome, great but not awesome, ok but not great, bad or pathetic.

Once you have listed down your goals & completed each of those goals yourself, rate your experience on the scale of 0-5, where 0 is "Bad" and needs immediate work & 5 is "Awesome!"

Pro-tip* : You can list down competitor websites & see how is the UI & UX ratings pan out on their website vs your website.

Tools you can use...

To get preliminary idea on the nature of traffic on your & competitor websites...

1. Similarweb.com: Simply add the website URL to this tool. It gives great ball park data about the website like, Global, Country & Category ranking of the site on internet, traffic sources report, referral reports, traffic content report, audience interest, and competitor sites. Its a great starter. You can access this tool from here
2. Alexa SiteInfo: This is another interesting tool which adds to the data you know about the website. Its similar to what similar web gives you, but a few snippets of information like engagement & keyword data make Alexa unique. You can access this tool from here.

To identify page speed errors / fixes on your website.

1. Page Speed Insights - This tool throws essential data about your website load times. It lists down errors and shows recommendations on how to fix them. You can use the tool here
2. Google Test My Site - This tool gives data about load status & load errors of your website especially on mobile. If you have a mobile specific website, you will need this tool. Even otherwise this tool can help you fix some essentials. You can use this tool here. 
3. GT Metrics - If you need a 3rd eye about your website load times, you can use this free tool to get a clear understanding about your website. You can use this tool here. 

Card Sorting Apps like Helio help you create tests and surveys on your website to collect data and organise your navigation menus.

You could use Browershots to view how your website looks on various browsers.

Date from these tools paired with data from Google Analytics (if you have it) would be great to get started.

We will continue with more steps for your website SEO in our next post.

Hope you liked this post. Leave your suggestions in the comments below & get in touch with me in case you have anything specific to ask.

Have a great day ahead.

Mitul Shingadia

Introduction to SEO for your website

Dear Learners,

Search Engine Optimisation, or as we know it SEO, is the process of positioning your website as Relevant, Credible & finally a Popular & an authority resource on your segment of business. It is a heartbeat for websites that keeps the momentum going. It definitely is a gradual & a continuous process. It starts even before the website is created & keeps evolving as the business grows.

Why SEO for any website?

Why do websites need SEO? Well the simple answer to this is we as people have changed the way we do things. We turn to internet during multiple moments. Lets broadly classify them as...

1. Moments of research (Looking for a restaurant, product, or a review on the internet)
2. Moment of decision (Compare products & services, interacting with the brand & downloading spec sheets)
3. Moments of purchase (Moment of truth) when your prospect is ready to become a customer.

Weather you are a blog providing information, or a platform enabling support or a website selling products or services, you want users to find your website in their moment of need. When they are looking for something on Search Engines and they cannot find you, you end up missing out on your potential traffic that could convert on your website & eventually your business.

Here are some cool stats for your understanding of current internet usage in India & USA

On-page & Off-page optimisation

To avoid the above scenario, you need to adapt a set of practices that would improve your chances to get listed on Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) when people are searching for what you offer. These set of practices could be broadly divided into two categories.

On-page Optimisation

The set of activities you would do to enhance visibility & ranking that is within the scope of your website. On-page is focussed on creating relevancy & positive user engagement experiences. This could be design, layout, themes, URLs, Images & even content that is on the most important pages of your website. Optimising all the UI (User Interface) & UX (User Experience) related elements of your website. This includes tools, forms, entry-exit pages, and much more.

Off-page Optimisation

The set of activities that are taken outside the peripherals of your website. These activities are focussed on creating a sense of trust, authority & popularity towards users with relation to your business niche. The quality of pages that are linking to your website account for major part of this process. Google assigns the quality of your website with a score called Page Rank (PR). It is this PR that defines the ranking of your pages for keywords you want to be found. 

Why Google & What is Google search console?

According to a SmartInsights report, almost 75% of global searches happen on Google. Read more on this report here. Google clearly is setting benchmarks on content & design standards of websites for ranking. It also is spending a lot of time energy, money and resources on research & development. Hence its a good idea to start your SEO strategy keeping Google in mind.

Google enables website owners to submit, manage & control the search behaviour & discoverability of their website on Google search engine with its own platform called Google Search Console, most popularly known as Google Webmaster Tools. This platforms gives comprehensive reports on your website indexing, discoverability & content issues. More on this coming up later.

How does Google work?

Watch the below video to understand how Google Search Works.

Hope you liked the video. As next steps to your learning, Visit Google's resource page to read more about how pages are ranked & an overview on algorithms that influence search results.

SEO Basics - What do I need to know?

Since this blog is and will always be focussed on the "Doing" side of things, here is the list of things that will be covered in future posts & would help you get started in your learning of SEO.

1. How to look at a website from an SEO perspective.
2. How to research for keywords
3. How to submit your Wordpress website to Google's index
4. How to write and edit content and making it search friendly
5. How to add schema using "data highlighter" tool on the Google Search console.
6. How to be discovered faster using external tools. 

Now that you know whats coming up, be sure to follow this blog and don't miss on these cool SEO learnings. Make sure you share this blog with your friends who need it & feel free to comment below to talk about how you liked this post and what you would like to see here.

Have a great day ahead.

Happy learning.

Mitul Shingadia