Online Marketing Today

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Hi Duncan, as you know, I run a very popular web site about growing vegetables on allotments in the UK. I rank very highly for key phrases including the word “allotment” or “vegetable growing”.

 Recently I realized that I was on page 3 of listings on a search for “Grow your own” which is apparently quite a popular term.  So my question is “how can I identify search terms related to the subject of my site that are worth targeting? Cheers” ~ John Harrison

Hi John,

I’m not sure if you mean identifying completely new search terms – or working with existing search terms of your site. Terms that are already performing to some extent, and then developing those further. In either case, both the Google Keyword Tool and analyzing your Website Analytics is going to prove invaluable.

Let’s start with the latter and work backwards.

It’s your home page currently ranking for “Grow Your Own” so that’s great.

It means Google already sees it as pretty relevant – in fact the 21^st most relevant website online related to this term when I looked (it might be fluxing a bit – hopefully upwards). Now I would take a stab in the dark and say that you probably noticed this by looking at where your traffic was arriving from in your Analytics.

Everyone should be doing that on a monthly basis.

More often than not you’re going to discover visitors arriving from search terms that you aren’t targeting directly – and you might not have top 10 rankings for those terms.

That means with a little focus and development, it can pay big rewards to put some more emphasis on such terms. Improvement in search engine rankings, means improvement in visitor numbers.

These could be terms that your initial keyword research completely missed – perhaps the Google Keyword suggestion tool didn’t show them – or that simply became offshoots and rewards of optimizing other related content.

For example:

On one of our niche websites related to keeping chickens – one of the most popular search terms visitors find us under is “clipping chicken wings” (and there are also off shoots such as “how to clip chicken wings”).

We did not target these terms directly. The rankings for these terms were simply an offshoot of one blog post that discussed the topic briefly, and the overall strength of the website also helped position that page.

Those rankings float around #5 in Google (sometimes lower and generally lower for the longer tailed terms). So knowing this, it would pay to put some focus on them to try to get them increased (and this is just one example of course – visitors found this website using 2,239 different search terms in January 2010).

One way to do that would be to link directly to that blog post from the home page with the anchor text “clipping chicken wings”. Being a blog, that content is now old. It is no longer linked directly from the home page anymore so it would certainly help to add more “weight” to the page.

As an idea – you could have a “featured / popular articles” section in your navigation and do this for multiple terms and pages that you wish to focus on like this.

We might also distribute a few articles related to this topic and link them back directly to this page to help further. You get the idea – focus on building some relevant links to the specific pages – both onsite and offsite.

FYI – other terms like this for our site include “chicken lice”, and “chicken pecking order”. None of these terms were targeted directly onsite – or with our link building campaigns. They are simply an offshoot of adding good, unique content to the site.

So back to your case – let’s look at the Google Keyword Tool.

It shows me that…

“Grow Your Own” (as an exact match – and you should always use exact match when doing analysis using this tool) has 9,900 unique searches each month.

NOTE: You simply place that term in the respective input box, then when the search has completed select “Exact” from the “Match Type” drop down menu. You then sort via the “Global Monthly Search Volume” or “Local Search Volume” depending on which data you want to work with.

If we work our way down the list we can then see search terms that would be extremely related to your niche audience.

Here are just a few without spending too much time on it…

• [grow your own carrots]
• [grow your own food]
• [grow your own fruit]
• [grow your own garden]
• [grow your own garlic]
• [grow your own herb garden]
• [grow your own herbs]
• [grow your own marijuana]
• [grow your own mushroom]
• [grow your own mushrooms]
• [grow your own potatoes]
• [grow your own shrooms]
• [grow your own strawberries]
• [grow your own sunflower]
• [grow your own tomatoes]
• [grow your own veg]
• [grow your own vegetables]
• [grow your own weed]
• [grow your own wheatgrass]

…obviously not all are appropriate but you get the idea. Most also receive low volumes of traffic (around 140 searches per month) although a few at the top receive several thousand searches.

If it were me, and I wanted to target this specific avenue of traffic, what I would do would be to create a new page on your website called “Grow Your Own” – and name the directory that exact phrase as well i.e.

…/grow-your-own/

I would then link to that page from the home page of the website (and potentially from every page of the website i.e. putting it in your navigational structure if appropriate). I would use the exact text “Grow Your Own” as the anchor text for the hyperlink.

If applicable I would include some relevant text around the link – perhaps…

“Grow Your Own” – Check out our brief “How To Grow Your Own…” guides.

I would then create (or outsource) a brief article related to each of the topics you want to focus on and then link to each article from that new page / section of your website. If you have existing content related to this, then you can simply link to that of course.

I would create the page names for each of those articles as the exact term you’re targeting. So “grow your own mushrooms” would look like this…

…/grow-your-own/grow-your-own-mushrooms/

…alternatively, in order to help pick up on even more specific search terms whilst still focusing on the primary term…

…/grow-your-own/how-to-grow-your-own-mushrooms/

…that would also help to increase rankings for anyone searching with “how to” in the front.

I would also include the exact term in the title of each respective page and so forth – basic search engine optimization.

If I really wanted to thump this progression of terms, I would even consider linking to a few of the more popular terms (and therefore more competitive) from the home page, along with to the new sub-section.

So imagine these are now links in your navigational section…

• Grow Your Own (links to the new section directly, which links to all new pages).
• Grow Your Own Mushrooms (links directly to the specific page).
• Grown Your Own Potatoes (as per above).
• Grow Your Own Herbs (as per above).
• Etc.
• All “Grow Your Own” Guides. (Links to the new section directly).

If you were to do this – other than the fact that it’s really good website optimization for anything you do – two things are likely to occur…

1. Either your home page ranking will increase for the term “Grow Your Own”. This would happen because you’ve now gone and added 5+ more instances of that keyword term to your home page. It’s already seen as 21^st most relevant so this is only going to help increase that.
2. More likely however is that the new “Grow Your Own” section is going to be picked up and outrank the position of your home page for the term. This is more likely because you’ve created a more themed section of your website – one that is even more relevant – that relevancy is going to be passed down from your home page (already seem as extremely relevant), to the new section, and to all the new article pages you’ve created.

…I hope that all makes sense.

If you have the time (or inclination) you could create 10 such “how to grow your own” guides – or you could pay someone $10-$20 to knock up a few “quick list” guides to include. The question becomes if it takes you (I’m referring to everyone reading this now) 5 days to write that much content – is it worth your time to do it? Or are you better off paying someone $100-$200 to do it for you?

Ultimately this new section on your website could produce several thousand new visitors per year, each and every year so if you have a good writer – to me it makes sense to outsource it so I can spend my time elsewhere. But everyone has to judge that based on their own budgets, time, etc.

If you have no inclination at all to go down the above route – you could simply focus on adding more incoming links to your home page (onsite but more specifically from third party websites) with the specific “Grow Your Own” term as the anchor text.

That would work as well – however you’re not going to be optimizing for the longer tailored variations of this term by having the benefits of new unique content.

Ok, so in terms of finding completely new search terms to focus on – terms that you aren’t getting traffic from already – ultimately it’s the same process.

Simply start with the Google Keyword Tool, enter some phrases that you think your audience would also be looking for – and analyze the results.

I know that’s a bit of a “general” answer – but I could write an entirely new article about doing that and might do so in the future.

Hope this has helped.

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