Wednesday, 14th of November

14.11.2012

Slogan of the day: Shortening the list

- Checking google rank on different keywords proved to be a very effective and fruitful tactic: not only does it reveal your/competitors website position in the most influential website top, but it also allows you to get new insights about who your competitors are, how many of them are there and what are their strategies. Since I've started this seemingly endless activity over a week ago, I have broadened our competitors list and discovering potential customers all the time. A week ago this list featured only ten names and URLs, now it's more than 20 of them, and more potentially coming.

- Shortening the list is hard, but absolutely necessary work. The main criteria for me is word overlapping: for example, if there are some overlapping words, like "zzz" and "the zzz" or "zzzs", than the last two of them will be deleted. That works with one exception: if google ranking / annual visits columns show different numbers for the seemingly overlapping words I save them both. For example, if for "zzz" word we have #1 google ranking and one hundred visitors a year, and for "zzz of yyy" our ranking is #10, but our competitors ranking is high, I will probably leave both words as they are for further, even more precise consideration. I will do so because apparently "zzz" and "zzz of yyy" matches for two different users request's. Users looking for "zzz" will most likely to find us, and that is good, but we must not forget - somewhere out there there are also users looking for "zzz of yyy", and we will lose them if not enough attention will be paid for the appropriate word. Sure, their numbers are much less than of "zzz" looking users, but they are, and that is the thing that matters most.

- Keyword list optimization continues, as I specify groups in the following way: now group name consists of Topic (this is usually name of specific area that is in our technical competition) and, through a hyphen - Website Section (or sections - since some of the words with broader meaning fits to several sections) that keyword fits the most.