Building a Theme with Niche Keywords

Many people have a simplistic view of keywords. Just putting two word phrases commonly searched for onto your website isn’t enough. You need to attract the right visitors from the right selection of keywords.  Search engines are actually quite clever at working out themes through indexing methods, saving you the job of over-thinking keywords.

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is an indexing method that identifies patterns in the relationships between terms and concepts. Words used within the same context (i.e. ‘new computers’ and ‘MacBook Pro’) have a relationship. With this relationship in mind, you can organise a keyword list into themes of related keywords. It’s pretty much how our mind likes to work anyway.

From those themes, your site’s best structure and content will start to emerge.

Tools to Help You

If you don’t have the benefit of your own consumer research, there are tools to help derive keyword relationships, like Google’s Wonderwheel. Wonderwheel, listed on the left side of Google.com search results, shows related keyword phrases that can be used to build subpages within each of your categories. (Just click to show the wheel’s results).

Chris Anderson’s 2006 book ‘The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More’ explains the theory that its best to concentrate on the smaller, more focused end of the customer movements/sales chart (i.e. the long thin tail). Since this book come out, every Internet guru has been talking about how to apply this methodology to internet search (keyword research).

As you assign related keywords based on their relationships, it may be you end up with several long-tail keyword phrases. This is a good thing. Achieving rankings for one or two-word queries (e.g. ‘web design, ‘landscape gardeners’, ‘car sales’) are important, but most experienced marketers have found they  generate the MOST targeted clicks and BEST sales conversions from three- to five-word queries (web design Brisbane, landscape design Sydney).

What I do is use the Market Samurai tool to investigate more three-word or longer keyword phrases. If you’ve got money on the line, then I suggest spending some time to research current market trends and keyword searches… it’s better than fumbling in the Internet darkness.