SEO keyword research: an aubergine is not an eggplant.

Keyword research is the foundation of  any SEO strategy. When you know what your potential customers are searching for, you can tailor your offerings to meet those needs.  That means working out which terms are bringing, or are likely to bring, the most traffic to your site, and which terms lead to the most conversions. Ideally you will have done your keyword research before you launch your site, as it may inform your information architecture. If you’re playing catch up, all is not lost, you can still come up with an effective keyword strategy.

Firstly you have to know what terms people are using.  You may have the perfect  product, but if you’re talking about selling aubergines and your customers are looking for eggplants, you’re going to have a problem with your search engine rankings.

An eggplant by any other name

I am orginally from Scotland, although I have lived in Australia for 10 years.  During that time, I have come across many subtle and frequently amusing differences in terminology between the two dialects of English.  For example, where I come from, to ‘clap’ a dog means to pat it, not to give it a round of applause.

In Scotland, we use the term aubergine instead of eggplant.  They are of course exactly the same thing.  But they have very different Google results.

These are the results I get when I type ‘Eggplant’ into Google.  All the top results are for the food eggplant, including eggplant recipes and the wikipedia entry for eggplants in the box.

 

But if I put “Aubergine” into Google, I get a completely different set of results.  As you can see below:

 

 

We still get the wikipedia entry for Eggplant the food at the top of the results, but all of the other entries here are for the Sydney northern beaches-based cafe Aubergine.

From these results we can conclude a few things.

Google knows that aubergine and eggplant are the same thing.  It knows that I am in Sydney, but it does not (yet) take into account that I am British and am likely to call the vegetable an aubergine before an eggplant. Google is trying to anticipate the intention behind my search so it thinks eggplant=vegetable aubergine=cafe, and possibly vegetable.

It should be said that Google’s exact algorithym is a secret and mysterious thing, which is constantly changing. What we can say for sure is that each new update is aimed at delivering the most relevant results to users. As a website owner, your job is to find the most relevant keywords that will bring customers to your site.

Keyword Research: Volume and Difficulty

Another major element to keyword research is volume.  You may claim top spot for a keyword, but  if it’s a completely new product, nobody is going to be searching for it yet.  Just think, would you have searched for “Android Phone” ten years ago?  I’ll give you a clue, the answer is no. Yet today it gets an average of 40,500 queries per month. Check out the graph below:

This is a screenshot from Google Trends, a free tool you can use to see what phrases people are using when they are searching the web.

40.5k searches per month is a lot of potential website traffic. So obviously if you are a small suburban gift shop that sells accessories for Android phones, you’re going to want to rank for Android phones right? Well you could try, but we don’t recommend it.

Google places a lot of weight on sites with authority – that means sites that are big, busy and have lots of backlinks (links to them from other sites).  Think Amazon, ebay etc.  It would take a mammoth effort to outrank sites like these on search engines.

Your small suburban gift shop might have to try some long tail keywords for this product.  Long tail keywords are longer, more specific phrases that may be less difficult to rank for.

So for example, the phrase “custom phone cases” only has an average of 590 searches per month, but it could be a lot easier to rank for this keyword.

Don’t get too niche though – “aubergine-themed android phone cases” would be an easy phrase to rank for, but unsurprisingly nobody is searching for it.

Which brings us nicely back to where we began.

Maybe the owners of aubergine cafe were onto something… Google Adwords says it gets an average of 6,600 searches per month for “Aubergine” in Australia, and yet one Sydney cafe is dominating the first page in my results.  So many searches, so little competition. Perhaps the cafe is full of British people eating moussaka…

At Kila Content, we use a range of tools to provide your business with a tailored keyword target list that incorporates search volume, difficulty and demand.

If your website isn’t ranking the way it should, why not get a Free SEO Check.