As part of the audit we do to kick off SEO strategy development, we ask folks to let us know who their competitors are.  Then we look at the competitors for search visibility on  the search terms we’ve been provided, and sometimes find, (through OK, way more meticulous research than might be needed, but you never want to leave any stone untermed), many times the competitors the client provides simply aren’t players.

We’ll find those URLs in the 20’s and 30’s ranks, or not present at all in the top 50. Checking out the top 20 URLs, competition that may be lurking just outside the client’s radar often emerges.  Sometimes an entirely new category of competitors emerges.  For instance, in an industry where dealers, affiliates or aggregators develop a lot of content about the industry (franchising, for example), those aggregators actually are your stiffest competition for getting your corporate URL seen in ranks 1-20.

This is a great example of why it pays to hire SEO out.  If you are coming up to speed on SEO, you might start your research by looking at which URLs are present on the terms you think are the best.  Then, if you don’t see your competitor’s URLs…you might think SEO isn’t all that important - since none of your competitors seem to be doing it.  What you don’t know by guessing is that there are probably dozens of search terms that people are using. Between not quantifying the Total Available Search Market(TM) and not understanding the competitive landscape, you may be overlooking the potential gains from SEO entirely.

The truth is, your prospects are searching.  That’s all you need to know, to know investing in SEO campaign management and analysis makes sense.  Besides, you really don’t want to look through data on who’s out there in the top 50 ranks for hundreds of terms on a zillion search engine pages, do you? And I do…

I’ve been thinking about keywords and phrases, henceforth referred to as KPs. There’s the pile of a few terms that have the big search numbers up front and a looooooong tail of more specific phrases. The long tail phenomenon is old-hat for the SEO crowd. Most people outside of search marketing probably aren’t familiar with it. They sit down to think of what terms they want to be found for, then come up with a list of terms that are incredibly general. So general, nobody actually ready and willing to buy would be using them. And people come in saying that they want to be number one on the internet for “book” or “computer” or “plastic surgery”.

It’s our job to teach them how search works, that they can’t be number one for those things, and that there are better phrases…KPs that are more specific, that indicate readiness to buy, that may be very specific to their industry area. We see the list and use it as a starting place to find the KPs that will make a difference and will work. But it occurs to me that we shouldn’t just dismiss the general or overly-competitive keywords. The single word KPs need to go, but some of the ones that you won’t win on *but* are likely to be parts of other phrases should get to stick around. Why?

I read that 50% of searches are unique. They’re long, funky strings of words. They aren’t going to show up on the keyword research and tracking tools. But you know what they are going to do? Include the words for the core ideas and features around the product. The one word keywords will wind up in the copy just as you talk about whatever it is you do. Take the term “SEO company”–there are 1,130,000 pages in Google for that term, and WordTracker predicts 996 searches per month on it. That’s some tough competition, but also a whole lot of eyes. Are you going to be #1? Probably not. Especially since it’s SEO–everyone’s site is optimized. But if someone is searching for an Austin SEO company or “Austin SEO company cost of SEO”, there might be enough content on our site about both of those things to make it relevant in one of these longer, unique search queries.

Even more interesting is the difference between “search engine optimization firm” and “search engine optimization company”. The number of searches isn’t too different–about 15%–but there are over 2x the number of competing pages for “search engine optimization company”. It’s just as important to pay attention to what the competition is as to what the predicted search volume is. “SEO firm” has a few more searches than “SEO company, but there are 870,000 more competing pages for “SEO company”. Not that the general terms aren’t worth going after–we’re ranked in the top 50 on Google for “marketing agency”, and it has the highest number of competing pages in this sample with 1.75 million. But that’s because we got the visibility by populating with terms that had it in there already, like terms about our work in B2B web marketing.

So while it’s hard not to squeeze that KP you’re going after in one more time, I think it’s worthwhile to make it a point to include some of those long shots that would be great to have, but so hard to get. Don’t waste the valuable real estate in tags and titles when you could be using the phrases you’re targeting for a good reason, but don’t reject them entirely. Do I have some rule of thumb on percentages and balancing this stuff? Nope. But it is worth taking the extra time and not missing the extra searches you could be getting.

There is a reason they call me Susan the Meticulous. I’m going with the notion it’s a compliment. I say yes, that’s me, and I have the shoes to match.

It is a safe (workplace!*) characterization. I do tend toward research and cross-checks. I perk up when I get an afternoon of View–>Source for a zillion websites to get a sense of how our client’s competitors are coding in support of their organic SEO. I jump with delight when I can get a whole year of client HitsLink data, and it if it includes conversion tracking, well, start thinking tranquilizer dart. And, yes, I always set the keyword research setting to return 1000 results.

I have, however, stumbled around the block enough times to respect some limits, one of those being we can optimize a website, at least on the first round, for a very finite set of terms. We’re talking somewhere between the legal driving age and the age you get dropped from your parent’s health insurance. Inevitably we’ve carefully pruned a list of a few thousand terms to a list of a couple hundred, and now the task is to choose which are the top 10% to optimize.

Usually there’s not a year’s worth of data (sigh) about terms that have worked for the client. OK, usually there is not a day’s worth of data about what terms have worked for the client. We’ve got data about search volumes and numbers of competing pages, but we all have to admit that data has imperfections.

So here’s my question. Other than using some variation of the ratio of search volume to competing pages, what comes to your mind reading this - how would you go about ranking a list of 200 great terms so you can take the top 20 for optimization? No matter your perspective - marketer, SEO expert, any other interested party…I am curious what first comes to your mind.

Because no one knows better than someone who adores manually comparing lists for overlap and gaps that sometimes the best choices have little to do with anything listed in columns and rows. Rather, they come from listening to what strategies seem interesting to folks like you, folks who might make it this far in to an entry in an SEO blog.

So let me know. And until then, I’ll be sorting and pivoting among columns and rows, earbuds tuned to the ambient wood flute and yoga bells channel, looking for clues.

*Please do not go looking for those shoes in my closet. My image would be so blown. I can only imagine the new nickname.