Welcome to My North Idaho Web Design & SEO Blog

I run a one-man search engine optimization (SEO) business out of scenic Coeur d'Alene, Idaho called The Espresseo. I started up this simple SEO blog to share some basic SEO knowledge with fellow webmasters in the area and hopefully gain some exposure to potential clients as well. I'd like to kick it off with a series on my specialty: keyword research.

This first post is simply an introduction to the idea of "keyword efficiency". Enjoy.

Knowing where to start is more than half the battle in SEO. Don't believe me? Think about it. If you rank first in Google for "blue midgets" but sell blue widgets, you've gained nothing. If you rank first for "blue widgets" and sell blue widgets, but there isn't enough traffic to capitalize on, you've gained nothing. It gets worse: If you rank first for "blue widgets", sell blue widgets, and there's plenty of traffic, but it doesn't convert to sales, you still have yet to win. Furthermore if you rank first, get plenty of traffic, and get a substantial increase in sales, but it cost so much to get there that your profit margin became too narrow, then all your effort is all for naught.

In SEO, the bottom line is the bottom line.

And the way to raise your bottom line is to find that cluster of keywords, or "search market" represeting the highest return on your investment (ROI). The way I approach that is by identifying the market with the most efficient mix of:

1. High traffic
2. Low competition
3. High commercial intent

Going through this process helps us identify markets to consider targeting. By this point we will have found groupings of keywords that are related to your product, searched for frequently (the more popular the better), plausible to rank for (the lower the competition the better), and reflect a commercial intent (rather than an information intent). Each keyword is assigned a single number as a measure of a its efficiency, and then keywords are grouped together according to different categories, and their values are averaged to give us a grade for each market. The higher the grade, the better.

Once we know the efficiency of all the potential markets, we can start to calculate your ROI. In order to calculate ROI we need to know two values: what your SEO campaign will cost, and what it will bring in.

To calculate what it will bring in we need to take the amount of traffic a given keyword grouping has, calculate how much of that we can drive to your site, project how many of those visitors will buy your product, and finally factor in how much profit (not counting SEO expenses) that would represent for you.

Your local SEO consultant or marketing consultant should be up-front about their costs (especially after computationally evaluating the market and getting to know your company and your goals), so once we know your profit we will be able to compare that to your marketing costs, and then calculate ROI. This should be done for each market (different markets may represent different products, margins, costs, etc.) and then you can sit down and make a very well-informed decision about which keywords you should target.

Figuring out where to start, answering the question "what keywords should I target with my SEO efforts?", is one of the most important steps in the SEO process. Fortunately, it's also one of the most computational. In the following series of posts I will elaborate more on keyword efficiency, specifically how it has been calculated in the past, what the weaknesses of the current methods are, where we can get our data, and how I am able calculate it now. See you next week!