Boom Media - web design, seo, search optimisation, wilmslow, cheshire

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1. Decide on your key phrases

Many people ask us about "getting to the top of Google" without really having thought about what phrases they want to be at the top of Google for. It seems some people think of optimisation as some general thing that covers all the bases but the truth is you can't optimise for everything, generally you optimise efficiently for two phrases per page in your site.

First decide what phrases you think are most appropriate., then we can go through an analysis of actual traffic patterns to finalise whether these are in fact the best phrases or whether there are similar alternatives that may reach a wider audience. you may be surprised at how much difference a word makes.

Illustration

We did some work for a client who produced high end garden rooms for numerous uses but especially offices and/or extra living rooms. The phrases they came up with were Garden Rooms, Garden Offices, Garden Lodges and Garden Studios.

Our analysis showed that one of the highest searches was actually for the phrase Garden Bedroom and that Garden Lodge registered almost no searches.

With this information we were able to optimise for the best phrases and not waste valuable resources being top of a search that no-one was making!

Long tail phrases

When looking at the best phrases we aim for what are known as long tail phrases - that is to say phrases of three or four words (or more if you like)

These are considered the optimal for three main reasons:

Consumers are getting more sophisticated about the way they search. With more experience people are starting to realise that the more specific they are in their searches the more likely they are to get the results they want. The more specific they are the more chance you have of picking them off
Any long phrases, by definition, will have shorter phrases in them and this will effectively kill two birds with one stone
the longer phrases are less likely to be contested than the short ones. The chances of getting to the top of Google for the phrase "Financial Services" is pretty slim considering that search comes up with 141,000,000 results (at time of writing). Much more likely is to get to the top of a search for "Financial Services Bridging Loan" at only 84,500 results and even more likely is "Financial Services Nantwich" with 36,300.

This also leads into the next point which is that the majority of long tail phrases tend to involve some kind of geographical descriptor, e.g. Crewe, Dagenham, Aberdeen - you get the picture, or even South West, etc. and this reflects the way people search for services that are closest to them

Illustration

We had a client who was keen to be at the top of Google for the phrase "Glass Bolton". We actually optimised for a series of phrases such as "Emergency Glass Bolton" and "Safety Glass Bolton"

Lo and behold, they are at the top of Google for the phrase "Glass Bolton" as well as being at the top for "Emergency Glass Bolton" and a raft of other phrases we identified for them.

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