Yoast » Keyword Research

Using Cornerstone Content to make your Site Rank

Joost de Valk — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 13:08:30 +0000

The most common question we answer in our website reviews is "how do I make my site rank for keyword X?". What most people don't realize is that they're asking the wrong question. You see, sites don't rank: pages rank. If you want to rank for a keyword, you'll need to determine which page is going to be the page ranking for that keyword.

Adding that keyword to the title of every page is not going to help. Nor is writing 200 articles about it without one central article to link all those articles to. You need one single page that is the center of the content about that topic. One "hub" page, if you will.

That page will need to be 100% awesome in all ways. Brian Clark of Copyblogger calls this type of content "cornerstone content" and has written an awesome article about it (a few years ago, already). In fact, go and read Brian's article, he explains that way better than I can, I'll wait... ... ... You're back? Ok, read on:

Position that new Cornerstone Content within your site

That article said a lot, right? It told you about keyword research, title tags and headlines, content and why your content needs to be awesome and more. Now let's talk about where, within your site, that content is going to live. In my opinion, really important content deserves a page within your site's structure, not a news item / post. It should be easily navigated to within a few clicks.

So, you go ahead and create that page within your site. Take some time for it, this is going to be the content that's going to make you rank, but not just that, it's going to be the content that is ranking. Which means real people will read it too and you need to convert those people. So think about search engines all you want, but think even more about the visitor that will end up on that page and give him / her something worth while.

Creating Internal Links

Now, once you have that cornerstone page, it's time for the next step: creating internal links for your article. You're going to do this by figuring out which pages Google already thinks are relevant for your targeted keyword / key phrase. The easiest way to figure out which pages Google thinks are relevant for that keyword is doing a "site:" search in Google. So if I were to try and find the most important page for "website review" within yoast.com, I'd search for:

site:yoast.com website review

You will probably find more than a few pages within your site. Go into each of those pages and add a link to your new cornerstone content. If possible, use the keyword you're targeting as the anchor text for that link, but most importantly: link from within the content. Don't just add some site wide sidebar / footer links. The reason for this is simple: links from within content are way more valuable than links from sidebars.

Afterwards, when you're writing more content for your site, when you touch on a topic related to your cornerstone content, don't forget to link to it! Now, let's go on to the last and final step:

Promote your Cornerstone Content

If you've created it well, your cornerstone content is something to be proud of, something that others will easily share and thus also something that will attract links. Don't be afraid to reach out to other people who have written about related topics: show them what you created and that it might be worth while for their visitors to see that. You might even want to offer them to write a guest post about the topic, linking back to your article.

Stock photo credit: Computer Generated Concept Of Cornerstone from Shutterstock.

Using Cornerstone Content to make your Site Rank is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

The basis of keyword research

Joost de Valk — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 12:04:26 +0000

Keyword research is the basis of all search marketing. It is the art of explaining what you do in the language that people use, and thus it should probably be the basis of all your marketing activities, both on and off the web. As an SEO, I use keyword research to determine what we should be ranking for. The issue is that I've often found that part to be a bit annoying, as people tend to want to rank for entirely impossible terms. Last week, I've found a solution, and that's what I'll show you today: the basis of keyword research. Keep on reading, as we'll get you started in the comments of this post.

Now, as you might know, I've been in the SEO business for more than 6 years. It took me all those years to find out what it was that I disliked about keyword research and what I was doing wrong. It also took someone who's actually not in our business, but who's in the business of business advice, to discover it. The guy that - unbeknownst to him - changed my perspective on keyword research was Doug Richard, at last week's Made in 48 hours. He graciously allowed me to use some of his slides for this post, for which I thank him.

Doug spent (and still spends, during his small business seminars) quite a bit of time on asking people: "Who are you? What promise do you make?". Turns out, not a lot of people can answer that question effectively at first. However, the minute you become good at answering that question, you'll be on your way to being found more easily.

You see, businesses are born out of ideas, some of these are great, some are not. But they're all born out of the idea that what you have to offer is special, and adds something to the market. That benefit, that advantage, that promise, is bound to also be reflected in the keywords people should be finding you for.

In fact, it's as Doug put it:

You are a secret waiting to be discovered by customers who are looking for someone to make that promise to them.

He then showed this clip from Mad Men which I'm not going to withhold from you, as it's entirely too genius. Go watch it on Youtube now, as embedding is unfortunately forbidden. Go on, this post will still here when you get back.

Now let me give you an example. During the event we talked to Dave Fairbairn. Dave is just starting up his new business, and he's going to sell motor apparel. Now, as it happens, the motor apparel business turns out to be quite competitive. When we went more specific though, we found out that Dave makes motorcycle jeans, jeans that are both well designed and fashionable. Dave doesn't just sell motor apparel, he sells designer motorcycle jeans. Now there's something you can both brand, and rank for.

You see, this is not a numbers game. Let me repeat that: this is not about numbers. It's about relevancy, and relevancy only. If Dave at some point thinks that he should be relevant for motorcycle clothing, he'd better get working on a new business strategy to become relevant for that term. But you know what? He's better off dominating his own little niche first.

Try and see if you can describe your company as eloquently and succinctly as Dave:

Maple Motorcycle Apparel are a feedback driven, design led, fashionable motorcycle jeans startup.

So, do you have a promise like that? If so, what is it? You might have noticed mine on my homepage:

Tweaking websites is what we do here at Yoast, from search engine rankings, to speed to user experience.

That's what I do. It's what I do for my clients, what I blog and speak about, it's what I'm good at. What are you good at? What are you offering people? Figure that out, and keyword research becomes a whole lot easier. There's always a niche you can win at, find that niche, own it, and then go up one level if you still want to.

P.S.

Doug is the guy that runs the mentoring club I spoke about in an earlier post, in which I am also one of the mentors. If the idea of getting advice from him, myself and other experts in the fields of HR, Social Media, Law etc. with the sole goal of improving your business appeals to you, you should sign up, we're starting in October.

P.P.S.

The day to day manager of the mentoring club is Nancy Fulton, one of the best writers I've ever had the pleasure of working with, and very experienced at what I've just been talking about. For the coming few days, Nancy and myself will be monitoring the comments on this post, and helping you craft your identity. So, fancy some free help? Get into the comments and give us the best you've got.

The basis of keyword research is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Just because I suck at PPC doesn’t mean you have to!

Joost de Valk — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 19:16:22 +0000

I'll openly admit to not liking PPC. I'll even go as far as saying that, while I do understand its uses, I loathe, yes, hate it. The fact of the matter is that the part of SEO I like and excel at is the technical side of things, and the structure side. The keywords? I know how to research them, and I know how to use them, but writing ads and maintaining large campaigns isn't my thing. That, and nothing else, is why you'll rarely see me do a post on PPC, or hear me talk about it.

So quite a while back, I found myself bitching about AdWords again when chatting with Aaron Wall, of SEOBook.com fame. And he "casually" dropped that he was working on ppcblog.com, and they were starting an AdWords training program. I ignored it, as I do most every mention of PPC. Recently however, I've had to dive into PPC a bit to support one of my "original" clients: my mother's Relatietherapie (relation therapy) practice. She was suffering badly from a few Google organic updates (which has since been fixed), and I wanted to make sure I knew what I needed to know to keep her practice going on AdWords should I need to.

I then remembered this AdWords training course Aaron mentioned, and got myself access. It's the smartest thing I've done in a while, I think. I've not learned this much about PPC, ever, and I learned it in an enjoyable and, I must say, pretty easy way. Going from the fundamentals, to keyword research, campaign structure to the Quality Score and just basically everything you need to know about it...

Anyway, I'm not getting paid for this "ad", nor if any of you sign up. I just wanted to share it with all of you, and make sure you start subscribing to the PPC Blog. Just see it as my way to make up for the lack of posts about that topic here :)

Just because I suck at PPC doesn’t mean you have to! is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Back in business!

Joost de Valk — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 09:17:55 +0000

So, I'm back! After twelve days of honeymoon on lovely lovely Rhodes, of which a couple of pics can be found on my Flickr, I've decided that yes, I need a better camera. If any of you have good advice on what I should buy as my first SLR, let me know. If you want to send me one, even better! But anyway, I'm back! Some of the things I wanted to share with you:

Upcoming events
We've got a couple of cool events coming up, and one thing I want to make sure is that all of you register for A4UExpo as soon as you can. For affiliates, search marketers and other online marketeers, it's one of the best conferences you'll ever see in Europe. Period.

In other news
I'm going through my feeds and want to share some of the cool stuff I've seen with you:

First of all, Authority Blogger "soft-launched". For all corporate bloggers who read my blog, this would be a great way too get training from one of the best in the business, Chris Garret.
My buddy Aaron Wall wrote a short e-book for WordTracker with "50 kick-ass keyword strategies", and I have to say: it's well worth the mere $39 they ask for it.
Christian Hockenberger, the guy who did the logo for Yoast, launched his new site, Princeofdune, and it looks pretty cool.
Smashing Magazine had a huge post called WordPress Developer's Toolbox, which is well worth the read.

I'll be working on some plugins in the coming weeks, and will try to get my WordPress newsletter out this week as well. See you all soon!

Back in business! is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

B2B SEO: Marketing strategy for specific niches

Erik-Jan Bulthuis — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 19:05:45 +0000

This is a guest post by my Onetomarket colleague Erik-Jan Bulthuis. You'll be seeing more guest posts from him and other people in the future!

Business to business marketing is a strange thing. In some ways, it cannot be compared to business to consumer marketing:

The market is much smaller
The products and services are more complex
Sales take much longer

This is part 1 of a series of 3 about B2B SEO. I suppose that the reader has a basic knowledge on SEO and wants to broaden that knowledge to B2B SEO as well. The most important goal for this article is comparing B2B SEO to B2C SEO. A little bit of background in marketing is also quite handy.

Buying process

This first article talks about the strategy of a B2B website. What are the targets and conversion moment and what do you want to communicate? First of all, we must understand that the lead time of a purchase in a B2B market is much longer than in a B2C environment. Even the most expensive B2C products like holidays only take a few weeks between gathering information about the product and ordering the holiday. The graph below (source: Enquiro Research) shows how long the lead time for a B2B purchase is:

As the graphs shows, it might take weeks or even months for someone decides to buy the product. In the same research of Enquiro Research, 85% of the respondents claim that they use online media somewhere in the buying process. This shows the importance of having a good B2B website for your products and services. Search engines do play an important role in the buying process:

The long lead time of a B2B purchase obviously doesnâ€™t apply for things like office supplies. However, it does apply for something like a complex technical installation. This has a lot to do with the money and people involved. The technician has to take a look at the performance of the machine, the economic man is interested In the cost of buying and maintaining the machine and if you arenâ€™t lucky, the managing director also has an opinion about the whole thing.

A B2B website contains information that eases the decisions that has to be made. There is a need for information about when to use the machine, the cost of the machine (purchase, maintenance and devaluation) and technical specifications. For most B2C markets, this information isnâ€™t that necessary.

Soft conversions and long lasting funnels

Al this desired information has consequences for the targets of your website. Most B2B websites donâ€™t offer ways to order anything online, because the products are too complex. The sales take place in a personal meeting or through a telephone call.

The way towards those sales however does lead through various interesting conversion moments of the website.

The download of a PDF with product specifications is a good sign of someone being interested in the product. Therefore, you would like to know how many of the people visiting your site download such a PDF. You also would like to know who these people are, where they come from etc. If the same downloader reads a text about the cost of the product a few weeks later, we can be quite confident that heâ€™s a serious interest in buying the product. Itâ€™s important to measure such â€˜softâ€™ conversions (i.e. conversions that canâ€™t be monetized immediately) as a funnel by means of long term cookies.

KPIs for a B2B website

The soft conversions just mentioned, lead us to the following question: What are the KPIs of our B2B website? A webshop has very simple KPIs: the number of sales, the number of newsletter registrations, etc. The KPIs of a B2B website are much harder to define.
The number of people sending you an email is an important KPI, as well as the number of people calling you by phone. Therefore, you would like to know how many people are calling you using a telephone number that they found on your website. It might be a good idea to mention a different phone number on your site than on other (offline) publications. In this way you can measure how many of your telephone calls are being delivered through the website (of course you donâ€™t know whether they came from paid search, organic search, referrers or some other source).

In most cases, the number of unique visitors on your website isn't a good KPI. I worked for a company that produces industrial pumping systems. In The Netherlands, they rank in de top 3 for 'pumps' which does lead to a lot of traffic. Many of these visitors are consumers looking for a little pump for in their pond. They increase the bounce rate quite a lot. The unique number of visitors in a certain period isn't a nice KPI, but they might use â€œnumber of unique visitors visiting three pages or moreâ€ as a KPI.

Expert knowledge at B2B SEO

Another problem of B2B SEO is the required expert knowledge. My overall knowledge increased a lot since I started working at Onetomarket. I now know quite a lot about industrials pumps, HR software, medicines and interim management. However, it's still difficult for me to do a good keyword research for the industrial pump manufacturer. After a few weeks of practicing, I do know how to spell peristaltic pumps, mag drive pumps and progressive cavity pumps, but my knowledge about those things is still pretty limited.

This happens a lot at B2B clients. It's important to make your B2B clients self-learning. Explain what they should do and train them. Have a brainstorm with your clients about determining keywords; let them write their texts; use their technical knowhow. Your client has also more experience in selling their products than you have. The client knows (if everything is okay) how their clients are calling their products and services and how theyâ€™d describe certain problems. Of course, as an SEO you should some basic knowledge about the products your client is trying to sell.

Different audiences

In the B2C market, the buyer is also the person who is going to use the product. This doesn't apply for the B2B seller. The purchase department buys a technical installation that the technical department ordered. Therefore, there is not much emotional involvement at the purchase of a product or a service. This means that you want to communicate solutions, rather than the beauty and the esthetic value of the product.

As said before, many people are involved in the purchase of larger B2B products. In the report of Enquiro Research four types of buyers are distinguished;

The economic buyer
The technical buyer
The user buyer
The coach buyer

You have to offer information for each of them. It isn't that hard to determine the information they need:

Economic buyer
Information about the price, the maintenance cost and the depreciation of the product.

Technical buyer
Technical information about maintenance, information about the installation of the machine, availability of spare parts, etc.

User buyer
Information about how to handle the product, manuals, a support service etc.

Coach buyer
The coach buyer is a manager with some influence. Tell him that your product is indispensible for the performance within his organization.

The list above has consequences for the information on your website. Your site will need quite a bit of information.

Conclusion

Building a good B2B website is hard work. Your role as an SEO is to train, coach and motivate your client, who will be doing all the hard work. Together you should define the information architecture and KPIs of your website. Please make sure that the visitors are climbing in their phone as soon as possible.

This serie is continued with B2B Content SEO, followed by the concluding B2B SEO: Link Building article.

B2B SEO: Marketing strategy for specific niches is a post by Erik-Jan Bulthuis on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Why you should check Google suggest

Joost de Valk — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 19:30:34 +0000

In the new Firefox 2, Google suggest is incorporated into the search block in the top right of your browser. This new box CAN have quite an important effect on the way you should optimize your site. I'll show you why with an example.

As readers who read this blog often well know, one of my best sites is www.css3.info. It's a site about the newest kid of the CSS family, and it attracts quite a lot of tech-savvy readers. As you can imagine, quite a large portion of my readers uses Firefox. However, in the last few days, this percentage has gone up... I started researching why, and that's what caused this article.

If you type in "CSS3" in your search box, you will get quite a lot of suggestions. The funny things is that on the SERPs for most of the suggestions you get, css3.info is in the top 10. And one the terms that you get suggested there, I have been getting more traffic. Now you tell me, is this a coincidence?

I thought so too... So: check Google suggest for your most important keywords, and make sure you rank for most, if not all, the suggestions it gives if that's possible. This especially applies to those having more tech-oriented sites, with a larger percentage of Firefox users.

Of course, if you do find that for more than 25% of the terms Google suggests, you're not ranking, and they are related to your sites topic, you should really reconsider your keyword research methods...

[tags]firefox, seo, google, google suggest, firefox 2, search engine optimization[/tags]

Why you should check Google suggest is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!