Turning Keyword Seed Lists Into Usable Search Terms & Key Phrases - A Beginners Guide by Brian Cotsen

In part 1 of 'What are keywords, key phrases and search terms?' we saw how we developed the 'seed' list of keywords from which we are going to build our successful keyword list for our website & SEM.

Having created a simple 'Seed' list for our keywords and key phrases we now need to look at turning this list into some useable search terms that we can build both our website around and develop the Search Engine Marketing campaign.

 

 

---

Turning Seed lists into usable search terms, keywords & key phrases.

You might well be thinking.

"Well we've done the work... we have our list of search terms that our customers use, now we can build the website"

But wait a moment.

Lets look again at those words on our seed list:

• Interior design
• Interior designers
• Colour schemes
• Home decorating
• Home makeovers
• Home Staging
• House Doctor
• Home styling

 

Now at first glance you might think that these are great words that really sum up what Abode Design do as a business.

And as such they should be our keywords, key phrases for the website and SEM campaign.

But look at them again and you might see that they are, in fact, very general terms and ones that might be used in lots of different contexts such as:

• Other companies offering the same or similar services.
• Books on home interiors.
• Shops selling home decorating products.
• Course on interior design & home staging.
• Paint shops.
• Paint manufacturers.
• TV shows.
• Magazines and articles about these subjects.

 

And although Abode Design operate and run services for London & The South East of England, any companies anywhere in the worlds who use English might use these search terms.

This would mean that when customers surf the internet using these terms, they might be looking for your services but equally they might be looking for something from the list above.

Also your website will be competing to appear with thousands of other businesses all targeting these same search terms.

So you can probably see that by themselves, the words on this 'Seed' list is not all that much use for Emma & Lizzie.

That's not to say that they shouldn't aim to use these keywords in their marketing campaign, but that they will need to refine their keywords for them to have useful and useable search terms for them to compete in the search engines successfully.

 

Modifying or refining these keywords/ key phrases?

What needs to happen now is to look at your actual business and start to see what words that, if tacked onto the beginning or the end of the keywords/ key phrases, more accurately define your business.

These extra words are called 'Modifyers'.

Modifyers turn the seed words or phrases into more accurate descriptions of what your website or business is all about.

They are often:

• Locations like 'London', 'New York', 'UK', 'Europe', South East England', 'Deep South'
• Actions like 'repair', 'delivery', 'finding', store'
• Business definers - 'shop', 'company', 'companies', 'consultancy'
• Physical or defining entity - 'book', 'course', 'red', 'lyrics', 'jokes', 'facts'

 

These modifyers often turn a one keyword or two word key phrase into 3 or 4 word search term.

A Case Study

Abode Design is a small interior design company based in South East London, United Kingdom.

So Emma & Lizzie began to look at other words that, when added to their original 'seed' list would more accurately define what they do and what their business is all about.

As we saw in the list above, there are a number of ways of modifying your seed list to create more accurate search terms for your website and SEM campaign.

Some of the words we came up with:

• Services
• Service
• Advice
• Company
• London
• South East London
• South London
• Dulwich (in South London)
• Blackheath (in South London)
• Affordable
• Consultancy
• Consultants
• Colour Psychology
• Colour Theory
• Colour Schemes

 

Now using those words we added them to our original 'Seed' list to create much more accurate keywords that define Abode Design.

• Interior Design Services
• Interior Design Service
• Affordable Interior Design Services.
• Interior Design in London
• Interior Design South London
• Interior Design in Dulwich
• Home Staging Services
• Home Staging in London
• Interior Design Colour Psychology
• Colour Theory Services

 

As you can see you could go on for some time creating 3 & 4 word search terms.

Emma & Lizzie came up with more than 70 variations.

Now Emma & Lizzie had the start of a really useful list of keywords that they could start to work with on their site.

Next we need to decide which of the search terms are ones that you should target for your own SEM campaign.

prev < 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, > next

top