I’ve been reading a number of sources re selection of keyword phrases, and the one that resonates most with me is Heather Lloyd-Martin. She’s the Direct Marketing Association’s (DMA) top SEO copywriting guru. This post is a condensed version of a whitepaper she wrote about keyphrase selection.

Legacy and Buzzword

Businesses should optimize for two different types of keyphrases.

‘Legacy’ keyphrases are search terms that are common and highly searched upon (e.g. marketing communications). ‘Buzzword’ keyphrases are not typically searched upon by a company’s target audience. Bingo! That’s exactly the situation with the Bolen website. I can’t compete with the big boys for legacy keyphrases (either organic SEO for ranking, or financially for PPC). I’m doing great for buzzword keyphrases that correspond to Bolen (top of the Google listings), but nobody searches for ‘B2B content marketing’.

Heather says you need to optimize for both legacy and buzzword keyphrases appropriate to your site. The next step is to plug those phrases into a keyphrase research tool, like WordTracker, which allows you to check your keyphrases against actual keyphrase searcher behavior statistics.

Tomorrow we’ll put WordTracker through its paces.

Tags: content, Copywriting, keyphrases, keywords, SEO