Search Engine Optimization –

Generating the right key words and key phrases for your website, industry and market segments

When I was hired on as a consultant at a major multi-national logistics company, one of the projects I worked on was generating a ROI driven national online marketing program, and one of the deliverables was a list of keywords and key phrases to be used for the organic and paid search engine optimization part of the program.

What resources to use to generate your initial list?

Since I was not intially familiar with the industry, the first thing I did was work with the product marketing team and also did a lot of research online. My initial goal was to build a very large catch-all list that covered all possible words and phrases that could be searched by our end customers.
By working cross functionally, I was able to compile a list of industry words and terms that were appropriate to what our customers might be searching under. Since this was a logistics company (B2B), I also looked at industry magazines and websites to add more words and phrases to the list. This was all in addition to using the keyword generators found through multiple sources (see Google, Overture -Yahoo, and Wordtracker links below)

How to refine and prioritize the list

When it came time to refine this large list of key words and phrases there were several factors I looked at:

+ Ranking in major search engine optimization
Tools like Word tracker, Yahoo/ Overture and Google keyword tools + What words and phrases were showing up for the competition
+ How well the word or phrase most intuitively matched to the company solutions and the customer pain points
+ Which words was the logistics corporate parent already paying for, on order to prevent cannibalization

How to define your lists:
Paid versus Organic (Natural) Search Engine Optimization Lists

Once the list was refined and re-reviewed and approved by the cross functional team, I organized them into two lists, paid and organic search lists.

Since I was working with a tight budget, my strategy was to maximize the entire prime list of key words and phrases for our organic website optimization and carefully prioritize and pull out of the list, the keywords and key phrases that we would use for the paid optimization, through Google and Overture (Yahoo!). There were two main factors I used to define which words would be selected for the paid list.

+ Which words and phrases had the best chances of driving (ROI) a purchase or transaction on the website, once they clicked -through
+ What words and phrases would help us best reach other strategic marketing goals the company was trying to achieve

After this list break down and having put together a solid national online marketing program, I informally presented to the Director of Product Marketing and the VP of Marketing and was able to explain the process and decision making that went into it. It was successfully received and both gave their approval of the program.

In some other blog post, I will speak more about the national online marketing plan I built and some of the best practices that came out of that experience.