As I have mentioned before, keyword research for search engine optimization is more than just traffic and competition metrics.  It is important to look beyond traffic and competition to try to understand the intent of the user when they type their query into a search engine.

Profile the User to Get Qualified Traffic

It is not enough to only look at keyword traffic, or only look at keyword traffic and competitiveness.  In order to conduct effective keyword research, it is important to develop user profiles in your keyword research.  With every keyword that you add to your list of potential target keywords, think about what the user is looking for when they type in that keyword.

If they keyword is “widget reviews,” you know that the user is probably not yet in the buying stage.  They are looking for more information about the quality and reliability of the widgets they are seeking.  In this case, you would want the target this keyphrase to a landing page providing user reviews or testimonials.  If the keyword is “buy widgets,” you can be pretty sure that they user is ready to purchase, and you would want them to landing on a page that allows them to satisfy this need.

When performing keyword research, segment your potential keywords into separate sheets, with each sheet geared toward a specific user profile.  Using our example with the widgets, you would want one sheet that contained keywords for a user that is looking for widget reviews, another sheet with keywords for a user looking for widget specifications, and yet another sheet for a user looking to buy widgets.

User Profiles Should Mirror Your Conversion Funnel

If the idea of segmenting your keyword research based on user profiles seems a bit overwhelming, keep in mind that your user profiles will likely mirror your conversion funnel.

Your sales team is likely familiar with these different phases of user purchasing phases.  In the beginning, the user may be looking for information on whether or not they even need a widget.  Later, once they come to the conclusion that they do need a widget, they may look for information about different brands of widgets.  After that, they make look for information on widget specifications, widget reviews, costs of widgets, etc.  Then when they have collected all of the necessary information, they may decide to purchase a widget from a particular company.

In this scenario, your keyword research would be segmented based on the user as they exist in each stage of the buying process.  Of course, your website will ideally be set up to direct the consumer from each stage of the buying processes to the next relevant stage.  That way, the user can land on your site in any stage of the buying process and be taken logically through each step to the final conversion page.

Remember, though, that there will likely be users who do not fall anywhere in the conversion process.  An example would be a reporter looking to get to your web site’s press page.  Even though this kind of user is not one that would necessarily be making a purchase, it is still important to include this type of user profile in your keyword research.

One of the biggest mistakes I see when it comes to analyzing keyword research is the singular focus on keyword traffic.  Don’t get me wrong, traffic is very important.  However, we sometimes get overzealous when looking at the projected traffic metrics when it comes to keyword research.  Clients see high traffic numbers in your keyword research reports and start drooling.  “We want the traffic, get us that traffic,” they clamor!  Just focusing on traffic, however, overlooks higher-level analysis points of keyword research.

Generally speaking, there are three major phases of analyzing keyword research:

1. Traffic
2. Competition
3. Conversion Rate

Traffic

Once you have a pretty good list of possible SEO keywords, you are going to want to look at the traffic projections for each keyword.  There are many tools out there to help you find these projections.  My favorite is the Google Keyword Tool.  Even though this is an AdWords tool, I still like to use it for SEO keywords.  I’m not really looking at absolute traffic numbers when I use this tool (or any tool, for that matter).  I’m really just looking at relative traffic estimates to compare each individual word against the larger list.

Competition

The next factor to look at after you get traffic estimates is to try to get a feel for each keyword’s competitiveness.  You can do this a number of different ways.  At a very basic level, you can look at the total number of results Google returns for a given query.

The query widget has 129,000,000 results.

This method, however, is a rather basic way to look and competition.  A more effective way to judge the competitiveness of a keyword is to look at how many results are returned when you use some of the advanced search operators such as intitle and inanchor.  When we combine these operators together, we can see how many results contain our keyword in both the title tag of the web page and the anchor text point to the page.  This is our direct SEO traffic.

Ideally you will want to target keywords that have higher levels of traffic and lower levels of competition.  Of course, higher trafficked terms tend to have higher competition levels, so you will have to make a decision as to whether or not you will be able to rank highly for words with high levels of traffic and competition.

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is the most overlooked point of analysis when it comes to search engine optimization keyword research.  Too many times, SEO consultants look at traffic and competition and then make their decision on which keywords to target.  Missing the critical step of analyzing conversion rates means that you may be choosing keywords that will send a high volume of visitors, but that may not convert when they get to the site.

Sometimes, you will be able to look into your analytics package to see historical conversion rates for keywords that you are thinking about targeting.  However,  many times you may find yourself in situations where your goals were not set up properly in your analytics package (or your goals have changed), or you were not getting much traffic to these target phrases so you do not have a statistically significant sample to pull conversion data from.

In scenarios where you do not have reliable conversion data to draw conclusions from, it is best to test your keywords in PPC.  Testing your keywords in PPC allows you to see what keywords drive the most traffic, have high or low levels of competition, and convert at the highest rates.  You can even test different landing pages to determine which keyword should be targeted to a specific page.

It is easy to get caught in the trap of simply looking at traffic and competition levels when doing SEO keyword research.  Adding conversion rate metrics into the analysis process adds an additional level of confidence that the keywords you decide to target not only generate traffic, but generate the right traffic that converts on your site.