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 The boss is asking you to ramp up the pay-per-click campaigns and drive more conversions, but the search-marketing budget is staying exactly where it is. What do you do? Apply this inside-out approach to generating lots of lucrative, long-tail keywords that are more likely to convert than more generic terms.
Demystifying the Keyword Spectrum
On one end of the keyword spectrum, you have one-word keywords that receive a comparatively huge volume of traffic. For example, if you're in the business of selling movies online, good examples of this kind of keyword are "movies" and "DVDs." Because of the high number of people searching for these terms, there are also a higher number of advertisers bidding on them. After all, bidding on these simple searches is fast, guaranteed high-volume and easy to do. But with high volume and high competition come high costs.
On the other end of the spectrum is the long tail keyword. Here, longer keyword phrases are more common. Because searchers are being more specific in their queries, the search volume is down, but the potential conversion rate is much higher. As you can imagine, a visitor looking for an "action movie that takes place in Baltimore" or a "top ten foreign film" has a better idea of what she wants and is more likely to purchase it.
Bidding on these long-tail keywords tends to be much less costly than bidding on the general one-word phrases. However, because each long-tail keyword gets fewer impressions, you need a very large number of long-tail keywords in order to achieve comparable traffic volume.
So why aren't all businesses taking advantage of the treasure seemingly waiting at the end of the long-tail rainbow? In many cases, it's because they don't have a solid idea of how to effectively and continually generate the large number of keyword phrases that will bring in qualified traffic – and that's where the inside-out process can help.
Introducing the Inside-Out Process
The inside-out approach helps you generate effective keyword phrases by defining the core of your business offerings, then moving out to add terms that tell searchers more about those core concepts. Let's take a closer look at how this five-step process works:
1. Define your Key Concepts
To get started, you'll want to identify the general categories that define what you have to offer. For example, if your site sells movies, your key concepts may be similar to your movie categories – things like "action movie," "scary movie" or "foreign film." Key concepts can also be product groups (like "DVDs" and "CDs"), product features (like "Director's Cut") or even specific target markets (like "families" or "tweens").
2. Identify Appropriate Synonyms
For every keyword phrase you come up with in step one, you'll want to generate a list of additional keyword phrases that can mean the same thing. For example, a visitor looking for an action movie may also search for an "adventure flick," and the young lady interested in finding a good scary movie may be just as likely to search for a "horror film." Continue through your list until you have at least one (and preferably several) alternative keyword phrases to choose from for each of your original keywords.
3. Add Common Purchase Terms
If you're in the business of selling a good or service online, there are certain standard words that are going to help you bring in potential buyers, no matter what your industry. Words like "buy," "find," "for sale" and "top" are all good indicators that searchers are looking for more than just information – they're looking to make a purchase. Add these words into the mix.
4. Reel Them in With Modifiers
Unlike general purchase terms, modifiers are highly specific and unique to your industry or niche. These are words that help paint a clearer picture of the core concept. Following our movie example, modifying words like "recent," "family-friendly" and "Oscar winning" could all be combined with our core "action movie" term to create valuable keyword phrases.
5. Account for Misspellings
Savvy search-engine marketers take advantage of searches generating from commonly misspelled or mistyped words. And while you probably don't want to try and guess the misspelled version of each of your keywords, selecting a few prime candidates is a good idea. In the case of our "action movie" example, including "acion movie" and "action movei" is a smart and potentially profitable move.
A Sampling of Keyword Tools
If you're starting to feel like you could come up with hundreds or thousands of potential keyword phrases using the inside-out method, you're absolutely right. And manually creating, organizing and tracking that list can be difficult, if not impossible. Thankfully, there are some great tools available to help you with all aspects of keyword generation and management.
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Who's searching on what? Google's Keyword Tool is an excellent resource for understanding the popularity of particular search phrases and for discovering additional ones.
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Tools like Lyris HQ Search Marketing and Keyword Spy go beyond the information that Google provides. Lyris HQ pulls in data from other search engines, uncovering hundreds of potentially profitable search phrases that you may not find in Google's tool. Keyword Spy gives insight into which keywords your competitors are using.
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Google Suggest offers "relevant suggested search terms in real time" as you type particular words and phrases. Take note of the suggested keyword phrases and consider adding any that aren't already on your keyword list.
Easier, More Effective Keyword Generation
It's true that generating keywords using an inside-out approach takes a bit more creativity and elbow grease than simply tweaking bids on the higher-volume search terms. But it's well worth the effort when you start producing higher conversion rates at less cost, positioning yourself to survive (and thrive) in these trying economic times.
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About the Author
Dane Christensen is the SEM Manager for Lyris. He is responsible for optimizing the company's PPC bid management across seven different search engines.
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