Credit union strategic planning, process improvement and SEO.

In another article, Are Credit Unions Search Friendly, we learned the importance of appearing on the first page of search results. The success or failure of your website lies, in part, on selecting the right keywords. Keywords are those small, two to five word terms and phrases which your potential members search for on search engines. Members, and potential members, use keywords to try to find your products and services online.

As a first step, brainstorm a list of potential keywords. Think about phrases your potential visitors would be likely to enter in to search engines in an attempt to find the services your site offers. Also consider surveying members as a way to expand your keyword list. Does the keyword relate to your products and services? Why are people searching for a particular keyword? People have different reasons for searching for particular terms. Sometimes they want information, other time they are browsing, and sometimes they are trying to buy a product of service.

The next step is to do a little keyword research. This is VERY important and should not be skipped. To do our keyword research we need to, first, visit a few websites. The first of which should be https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. They have a very good keyword tool, and best of all it’s free!

Once on their site, enter the most generic keyword from the list into the software. In our example, our keyword would be “mortgage loan”. You’ll notice that in the screenshot below, Google Adwords will return a list of related terms. The keywords column will show us the top search keywords that contain the words “mortgage loan”. The “approximate search volume” column will show us how many times the specific keyword has been searched for in the previous month within the Google search engine. This step is critically important because we need to know if there is a market for whatever topic we choose to sell. This tool will quickly show us if people are looking for what we want to sell!

You’ll notice that the keyword “mortgage loan” was searched 6,120,000 times during the previous month. DO NOT start off by optimizing for the keyword “mortgage loan”. Why, you ask? If a keyword is searched that many times in Google, then 100 times out of 100, the competition you will have to outrank in Google will be extremely fierce.

Not only is the competition fierce, but think about it… How targeted is the keyword “mortgage loan” anyway? Not very targeted at all. Someone searching for the keyword “mortgage loan” could very well be looking for free information on mortgages. They might be looking for the definition of mortgage loan. It’s really hard telling. Chances are, they’re not looking for anything specific about mortgage loans.

The keyword “mortgage loan” is not something you should try to take on. For a brand new website, or one you’re just beginning to optimize, it’s better to select more specific “long tail” keyword phrases.

The "long tail" is a concept pioneered by Chris Anderson (the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, who runs the Long Tail blog). From Chris's description:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

This concept relates exceptionally well to keyword search terms in the major engines. Although the largest traffic numbers are typically for broad terms at the "head" of the keyword curve, great value lies in the thousands of unique, rarely used, niche terms in the "tail." These terms can provide higher conversion rates and more interested and valuable visitors to a site, as these specific terms can relate to exactly the topics, products and services your site provides.

Let’s take a quick peek at Google so I can show you exactly how many websites are competing for this keyword.

If you were to optimize your website for this keyword, you’d be competing against over 24 million other websites! I don’t know about you, but that’s an awful lofty goal to start with. It’s always best to start off on the keywords with less competition. Get some traffic with those keywords, and then as your website gets older and you build some authority in the search engines you can focus on optimizing for the larger keywords.

OK, so back to finding which keywords we want to target. If we scroll down, we can find some more specific keyword phrases like “mortgage loan refinance”, “mortgage interest rates”, and “how to get a mortgage”.

These are potential keywords we should target to begin with. Once we have our list of 3 to 4 keywords, we need to go to Google and check out the competition to see exactly how hard it will be to optimize for the specified keyword. We’ll begin with the keyword “mortgage loan refinance”.

If we go to Google and type in the keyword “mortgage loan refinance”, without quotes, you’ll notice that the #1 ranked website for “mortgage loan refinance” is: www.mortgageloan.com/refinance-mortgage which is not a top level webpage, meaning it’s not simply www.mortgageloan.com . It is a sub page off of their main homepage: mortgageloan.com

This is good news for us because, typically, if a website’s subpage is ranking well in Google, we have an immediate advantage if we choose to target the same keyword with our homepage (i.e. www.domain.com). You’ll also notice that the website has a Google Page Rank of 5.

Note: Here’s a quick definition of Google PageRank. PageRank is Google’s way of giving a specific value to how popular a website is. It is based on the number of “votes” other websites cast for another website. A “vote” is simply when another website places a link on their website that is pointing to another website. Generally, the more “votes” or links you have pointing to your website, the higher your Page Rank (PR) will be. Page Rank is one of the many factors that Google takes into account when ranking websites. In order to see your own Google PageRank, as well as others, you must have the Google Toolbar installed on your computer. You can get that for free here: http://toolbar.google.com/.

Seeing that the #1 ranked website for this keyword only has a Page Rank of 5 is pretty good news, because a Page Rank of 5 should be reasonable to obtain.

After you install the Google toolbar and browse through websites, you’ll notice that most websites online have between a 2 and 5 PageRank. The extremely popular, high traffic websites tend to have PageRank’s of 6 and 7. A select few will have PageRanks of 8 and 9… and only a couple websites on the entire internet will have a PageRank of 10. Those websites would be sites like google.com themselves. If a website has a PageRank of 7 or higher, it would be best to not try to outrank them. Remember, the primary way to increase our website’s Page Rank is by getting other websites to link to you.

Next, view the source code of this website by clicking “view”, then “source” option within our web browser as shown below: Source code is simply the code that was used to create the web page. You don’t need to know html, which is the programming language used to create most websites, so don’t worry. You just need to know a few things to look for when viewing the source code.

This will open up a text file for us to have a look at and see if this website is actually optimizing their website. As we view the source file from this website, we need to look for a few things, which include:

Whether or not they are using <h1> header tags and are placing the keyword “mortgage loan refinance” within those tags.

Whether or not they are using their main keyword in the <title> tags of the website.

Whether or not they’ve bolded, underlined, or italicized the words “mortgage loan refinance” anywhere in the body of the webpage. within the bold tags.

Whether or not they are using <alt> image tags and placing the keyword “mortgage loan refinance” within that tag.

The final thing we want to note is whether or not they’ve placed the keyword once towards the very beginning of the web page, and once at the very end of the web page.

We will cover the above items in greater detail in another article, “Optimizing a Website”.

The main idea behind ranking well on Google is to analyze the top ranked websites and then do those things that they’re doing, but just a little better to one up them, which should lead to a better ranking. This is only part of the equation. There are still many other things that Google deems as critically important when ranking websites. Those things are mostly the Off Page Ranking factors, which will be covered in the article, “Growing the Site’s Popularity”.

You will continue to go through the same process for the other 2 keywords found. It is best to analyze the top 5 ranking websites for each keyword. If the top 5 websites for a specific keyword have a Google Page Rank of 6 or higher, it’s probably best to not shoot for that keyword until you build some momentum, and authority, by ranking well for the longer keyword phrases that have less competition.

“Optimize The Wrong Keywords And You’ll Likely Never See Results …”