Keyword Analysis. Why!? Why!? Why!?

So what did I learn last week? Well I completed my first keyword analysis for one of our sales team and I can see now why the rest of our team hate doing them so much. I’m not going to lie to you doing a keyword analysis is so tedious, probably the most tedious part of my job. They may be boring but how important are they?
For us it’s the first stage in the long, often time consuming process of Search Engine Optimisation on a client’s site. A keyword analysis is often the first point of contact that the design-ing team have with a client’s website and basically puts down all the information that the sales team need to pass on to the client with regards to which keywords will be best for their site and the timescales for each search phrase. In our business it seems that everyone wants to know timescales,
“How long will it be before we’re on the first page of Google?” and the truth is without the keyword analysis we don’t know and after we’ve done one we can only give an estimate of timescales. An estimate it may be but it’s a very calculated estimate, it’s not just a stab in the dark.
So how does it work? I can’t tell you exactly how it works because that’ll be giving it away but basically we take a couple of related search phrases to the client’s site, and we compare the current sites that come up with those phrases. If the current state of our client’s site is comparable then we lay down an estimate. Otherwise we go onto a search phrase that is well-suited. Then it’s just a case of ciphering the phrases down and tweaking them so that we can find search terms that are competitive for our clients at that point of time. In the first 12mnths of an SEO contract we’ll look at getting the page rank for our client up and after this first time period we can then, more often than not, change the phrases.
With a higher page rank we can get more competitive phrases.
Here at Just Search we’re always doing our research, not just on SEO techniques but on our client’s websites as well. This ensures that we can give them exactly what they need for a price that is reasonable. Whether its is a new site with a low page rank or a more accomplished site that just want that last push off the third page to the second and, ultimately, to the first.

Martin Vernon
Design and Activations