Comments on: Picking the Best Keywords for Your Geotargeted Pages

By: Mike Flacklestein

Mike Flacklestein — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 15:21:11 +0000

I live at 28640 Commonwealth in Seattle. Been up here before?

By: Russ

Russ — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 05:12:01 +0000

You’re right, it doesnt say just what people are searching for, it does everything for you. You find out which terms have the best combination of weak competition, impression rate (searches), and click throughs.

It worked fantastic for a personal client of mine (a barter for a wedding reception). While I can’t tell you what exactly was searched most for, I can tell you that the performing keywords were those where locale was second when doing searches involving the word “home” but locale first when doing seaches involving the words “real estate” or realty. ie: “homes city, st” performed best as did, “city, st realty”.

Also, I prefer using the number of results in an allinanchor:”words go here” query rather than simply a “words go here” query to determine competition. I find this tends to give me a better idea of how many people, relatively, are “competing” for that phrase.

By: Brian Gilley

Brian Gilley — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 18:05:39 +0000

I think you have to target different keyword “sets” for terms related/similar to “raleigh real estate” and build pages accordingly (as you mentioned).

I also like to look at total numbers of pages indexed Google and Yahoo for those diferent terms, like:

1) “real estate in Raleigh”
2) “raleigh real estate”

If one term, like #1 noted above had 31,800 results while #2 had 312,000, then we build pages according to total # of indexed competitor pages, often going for the lessor marketed terms.

If a term had 2,500,000 results, and let’s say it was “raleigh real estate,” then we would opt to get the “change left on the floor,” so to speak, by using another keywords with often 3, 4, or 5 keyword phrase variances. Many will argue with this but I really believe that you get higher conversions/leads that way.

Don’t get me wrong, I love ranking for the much more popular terms but let’s get realistic. If 2.5 mil results are already there and you’re just starting out with new pages or a new site, it might take you a year to get there (white hat method) going for common phrases.

Dario’s method above is a realy good one as well.

By: Tony Spencer

Tony Spencer — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 16:54:36 +0000

Russ,
That doesn’t tell you anything about what people search for.

By: Russ Jones

Russ Jones — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 16:32:10 +0000

I like the black-hat method. Launch a site using black hat content generation with every keyword combo you can think of. Once all your pages get indexed, wait 3-4 days. Delete whatever doesnt stick (301 to home page), and replace what does with good content.

We actually have gotten away with this on white hat sites as well. Do some CG, wait for it to get indexed, and then delete the generated content and replace it with good on the pages that stick.

By: Tony Spencer

Tony Spencer — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 15:14:10 +0000

Oh yes! I forgot to mention the Adwords trick. This is really the best approach to finding out the best combos.

By: Dario

Dario — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 00:06:23 +0000

One tool I like to use is Google Suggest It gives great ideas on what people search for. For example you can type in "raleigh real", and you can see that almost as many people search for "raleigh realestate" than "raleigh real estate". If you believe Google's numbers. It is also great to type in "keyword a", "keyword b", "keyword c", etc., and see the strangest things people search for. Another tool I like is Adwords. Create a campaign, add all kinds of keyword combinations it there, wait a couple of weeks, and see what keywords people actually search for. Of course, this one can get expensive if you are not careful.