Selecting keywords

We shall take the example of a fairly well known company, Samsung, that sells refrigerators / home
appliances to consumers

How to start?

To begin with, use intuition to produce a long list of possible keywords. Think of what keywords a
person who wants to buy a home appliance might use

The buyer might use…

 The brand: Samsung

 The company’s product: home appliances, refrigerators, Samsung superior special edition
refrigerator
 The company’s services: Samsung technical assistance
 What the user needs: buy home appliances
 Some misspelled version of the above: “samsong”, “samsug refrigeratr”

This list can be extended by ….

 Discussing with others in company (sales, marketing etc)

 Looking at competitors websites
 Talking to customers
 Using Google’s keyword planner or other such tools

It is a good practice to group keywords in to clusters

 Brand cluster: keywords that have to do with the brand or variations on the brand,
e.g.Samsung
 Generic cluster: keywords that have to do with the sector or market in which the business
operates, e.g. home appliances, refrigerators etc
 Mixed clusters: keywords that have to do with the sector and brand (combination of
previous two clusters) e.g. Samsung appliances, Samsung refrigerators

Once we have a long list, we should trim it down to 8-10 words, which we can work with

Three factors must be considered to select right keywords

 Number of searches: as a rule, we want to choose words that appear in a high volume of
searches. Google’s keyword planner, which gives number of global and local searches for
each word, can help us in this.
 Relevance: the more relevant a keyword is the better the chance of conversion. Initially
determining relevance of different keywords is a matter of intuition and experience. The
choice of keywords can be refined after experimenting with a number of keywords. How
keywords perform in PPC campaigns will also a good measure of how they perform in
organic results
 Competition: one should strive to choose keywords with less competition.

Generally speaking, the ideal keywords will have high volume of searches, high relevance and low
competition. This combination, however, is not easy to find.

The words that get most searches tend to be very general and less relevant and so have less
likelihood of conversion. It may therefore be better to focus on words that get fewer, but still
sufficient searches and more relevant. These are known as longtail keywords i.e. keywords made up
of more than one word. For example, “best price on Reebok training shoes in Delhi” is “longtail”. The
longer the tail, the more qualified the traffic we get.

Keyword identification table

keyword No. of searches relevance Competition Result

Samsung high Very high Low Selected
Domestic high low High Discarded
appliance
Designer medium high Low Selected
refrigerator
Samsung low Very high Low Selected
superior special
edition fridge
Refrigerator medium low Low Discarded
technical
assistance
Buy home high low High Discarded
appliances
Samsog Low medium Low Selected

One of the chosen words is the brand name, Samsung, though it may have a low search volume,
must always be included in SEO (and SEM) in order to exclude the competition from search results
relating to our brand.

This list can be fine-tuned assessing how much traffic and conversion each keyword generates.