As I mentioned, I’m working on two different projects. This post is about the proper keyword research we hope to actually use for Porter Novelli as opposed to me messing around with diagrams and stuff.
This is really, really baby step stuff so bear with me here.
Doing a proper keyword search is much more complex and dullsome than my fun graph would suggest. It involves having a look at every single variation of your keywords and search terms and every different permutation – like watching paint dry several times but in different shades of beige.
I initially started with a list of core keywords which are unique-ish to Porter Novelli. These include “Porter Novelli” [obviously], spokespeople, office names, and various brands throughout our organisation. The way I saw it was that if people were actively looking for Porter Novelli brands or offices they should be able to find it easily.
Next, consider searchers who may not be actively looking for you, but looking for services you provide. For instance, we’d like anyone looking for a “health care PR agency” to visit us.
This is where it gets really dull, but will prove utterly invaluable. Basically, I’ve gone through our website looking through our services. I’ve listed them and used Google’s Keyword Tool to suggest variations [I’ve ignored misspelt words for now].
Therefore, for the term “public relations” I’ve got:
public relations
publicist
publicity
PR
[You’d do this for marketing / communications / etc too]
You then need terms that will complete the search. Again using Google’s Keyword Tool I found key terms which I grouped into:
Qualifier PR agency
Geography [“PR agency Texas”]
Industry [“health care PR agency Texas”]
Services [“Digital communications agency in Texas?”]
I couldn’t think of a decent term for the last one but often people search with another qualifier [“Top 10 PR agency Texas”].
This takes ages and involves redoing the Google Keyword tool for each term that comes up just in case you miss anything out.
Right, now that I’ve got that out of the way. Interesting stuff next time [hopefully]. I can’t even be bothered sticking a nice picture on this post.
Much ado about nowt 