Keyword Targeting

If you don't use it already, you should acquaint yourself with the Google Keyword Tool, which can be found here - https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. This tool is an absolute must for your SEO research, as Google is telling you just how popular certain keyword phrases are within their search engine.

I'd like you to load up the Keyword Tool and type in the phrase - Car Tires.

You will see a section above the search box that says Results Tailored For: Country [Edit]

It is important that you click the [Edit] button and select 'All Countries and Territories', which can be found at the very top of the menu. Unless you're targeting a specific geographic area, you should always select this option.

Make sure the 'Use Synonyms' box is selected, and then push 'Get Keyword Ideas'.

You will see how many searches per month the phrase 'Car Tires' gets, but you will also see how many search results various combination phrases get as well. Examples include 'car rims tires' and 'wholesale car tires'.

The Common Misconception With Broad Keyword Targeting

The important thing to understand is that the number of searches indicated doesn't reflect how many times 'Car Tires' by itself gets searched per month. It indicates how many times searches containing those words get searched. This includes all the combination phrases. It's very important you understand this.

If someone searched for 'Cheap Car Tires' then it would still register as a search under 'Car Tires' as well as 'Cheap Car Tires', even though the person wasn't searching for 'Car Tires' by itself.

This means that if you had a website that was ranked well only under the phrase 'Car Tires', then you wouldn't be getting anywhere near the amount of hits as you might think.

Take for example a keyword such as 'Water'. The Google Keyword Tool will tell you that the keyword 'Water' gets over 60 million searches a month! Who on earth would search for the word 'water' by itself? Not many people at all.

People would search for phrases containing the word 'Water' however. Just think of phrases such as - 'water front', 'water slides', 'clean water', 'water damage'.

These too are broad keywords, think of more long-tail keywords within these keyword phrases such as 'water front real estate', 'california water slides', 'clean water filter' 'water damage insurance'.

Suddenly it becomes perfectly understandable that the word 'Water' may be searched for over 60 million times a month.

I get lots of people asking me why they're not ranking under their broad keyword, and that is the reason. The broad keyword by itself may have a very low search volume, despite what any keyword tool is telling you. It's the combination phrases that contain the broad keyword that contain the real searches.

Therefore if you want to rank under a broad keyword, you must first rank under the combination phrases. Once Google starts to give you trust under the combination phrases, they will see some consistent words in your anchor text, and will thus pass you authority for those consistent words.

This is similar to long-tail keyword targeting, however we're only using these long-tail keywords to boost our site's authority for our main keyword phrase, which in this case is 'Car Tires'.

For our example, let's look at some combination phrases for the phrase 'Car Tires'.

At the time of writing this, the phrase 'buy car tires' has 2000 searches a month. So you may well think "Well I'll just rank myself under the keyword phrase of 'buy car tires' then". Stop right there.

If we try and directly target the phrase 'buy car tires' then we're making the same mistake as we did when targeting the phrase 'Car Tires'. 2000 searches a month is still most likely going to be too competitive, so we need to dig even deeper. What you want to do is type in the phrase 'buy car tires' into the Keyword Tool search box and hit enter,

We will now see search phrases come up with very, very little competition.

Some search phrases that come up include - 'buy used car tires', 'buy new car tires', 'buy cheap car tires', 'places to buy car tires'.

You will notice all these phrases have a low amount of competition, and therefore we can hope to achieve a #1 ranking in Google under these phrases.

What we want to do is create a page on our Car Tires website optimised under the term 'Buy Car Tires'. We then want to vary the anchor text in our backlinks pointing to this page to contain the phrases 'buy used car tires', 'buy new car tires', 'buy cheap car tires', 'places to buy car tires' etc. Notice we're including the phrase 'buy car tires' but we're varying it in order to contain authority under the specific combination phrases.

Once we've built enough backlinks pointing to the page, we will eventually gain authority under the term 'Buy Car Tires'. Once this is done, we can then look at repeating the same process for another phrase, such as 'Cheap Car Tires'. We want to create a separate page on our site that's optimised under this new phrase, repeating the process of finding long-tail keywords for that phrase. We keep digging until the phrases we're targeting are no longer competitive.

We also want to link all of our pages back to the main page of our site, with our primary keyword as the anchor text (in this case 'Car Tires'). This is what will give our site authority under the keyword phrase we're targeting.

After we've done this with enough phrases, our site will eventually gain authority under the term 'Car Tires' by itself. Not only that, we will also have a massive amount of authority under the combination phrases as well. Google will reward us with a lot of authority for our desired term.

This is essentially how you target broad keywords. It will take you a lot of time to do this for competitive keywords, and that's when outsourcing and ghostwriters come in handy. But it can be done, and by following the process I've explained you can rank yourself under just about any broad keyword phrase imaginable.

So to summarise, the chart below indicates how to target your keywords-

Homepage Page 1 Page 2 Page 3

Broad Keyword Combination Keyword Combination Keyword Combination Keyword

(eg: car tires) (eg: buy car tires) (eg: cheap car tires) (eg: discount car tires)

Page 1, Page 2 & Page 3 all point to the Homepage with the anchor text 'Car Tires'. Your articles and social bookmarking submissions all have links pointing to Page 1, Page 2 & Page 3 with varying anchor text.