Social Media Marketing and Social Media Optimization, as well as traditional Search Engine Marketing, are directly impacted by Keyword Selection.

What most clients do not understand about online marketing, website construction, SEO or SMO is Keywords, more specifically Keyword Selection. If we have a chance to, we will be glad to do an analysis of a prospective client’s website and see whether the keywords for which they rank actually have any value. If the client doesn’t know anything about Keywords, then educating them is likely to identify the pain point they didn’t know existed. Specifically, if they see a demonstration that they may be missing out on 80% of highly valuable target traffic (potential new business) for related keywords in their target audience…the awareness of losing that business should get their attention.

Keyword Selection has become a combination of art and science, so in the following outline I will provide the fundamentals to give you a high level understanding of how sophisticated Keyword Selection has become. Most people do not make appropriate keyword selections, so understanding this will help you guide discussions in the future.

The Keyword Selection issue with respect to impact on search engine ranking is four-fold.

• First is whether the keyword is considered a Root Keyword (also called a Primary Keyword) or whether it is a Keyword Stem (also called a Secondary Keyword).

• Second is whether the keyword is “Global” or “Localized” and this means whether the keyword is geographically concentrated on the vicinity around the clients location, i.e. dental implants Houston.

• Third is the Keyword Value. We want our clients to obtain search engine rank for 3 types of keywords, High-Value, Medium-Value,and Low-Value. What you don’t want is to rank for keywords which have No-Value.

• Fourth is Keyword Length. Root keywords are single words, like Dentist (very broad). Secondary Keywords include both Keyword Stems and Keyword Phrases (two or more words as part of the keyword). There are “short-tail keyword phrases” (two to four words in the keyword phrase, still fairly broad) and there are “long-tail keyword phrases” (very lengthy and detailed phrases which are highly specific, very narrow). Long-tail keywords are typically competitive niche markets rather than the hugely competitive broad keywords.

So, here is the simple example for what all the above looks like:

Root (Global) Keywords = dentist, dentistry, dental.

Keyword Stems (Secondary, short-tail) = dentist office, dentistry practice, dental office

Localized Root (Global) Keywords = dentist houston, dentistry houston, dental houston.

Localized Keyword Stems (Secondary, short-tail) = dentist office houston, dentistry practice houston, dental office houston .Long-tail keyword phrase = small business dentist office providing top dentistry practice in houston.

Keywords in the above categories are further value gauged by some general “rule-of-thumb” benchmarks:

1. Number of Pages Indexed

2. Number of Monthly Searches

3. Average Cost per Click

If you go to Google and search for “dentist” you will see that Google has indexed approximately 36,300,000 pages of content.

In comparison, if you Google “dentist office houston” you will see that Google has indexed approximately 15,100,000 pages of content, less than half of “dentist” total pages indexed. Further down is the long-tail keyword phrase “small business dentist office providing top dentistry practice in houston” which has approximately 6,620,000 pages indexed.

The number of monthly searches done on any keyword of interest can be discovered at http://www.google.com/sktool. If you go to that page and type in “dentist” you will see that 11,100,000 searches were done on that phrase last month. The number of searches done last month for “dentist office” was 74,000 searches, and the “dentist office houston” phrasehad ZERO searches last month.

Obviously a website ranking in the first page of Google for “dentist” is going to have much larger traffic volume, but a dentist
ranking for that root keyword globally may have patient inquiries from Boston even though his practice is in Houston.

A dentist may be able to claim “First Place Ranking” for “dentist office houston” but if no one is searching by that keyword phrase it has no value.

Determining the most likely keyword phrases where you can economically afford to compete to drive the highest traffic is the real goal of Keyword Selection.

Hope that helps lay a foundation, and please understand that there is TONS more detail below all this, so the importance of having a Strategic Keyword Selection process cannot be over emphasized.