Choosing The Target Keyphrase for pMetrics

By ryancaldwellAdvertising

Performancing has this killer site statistics app called pMetrics. You might have some killer app, or some killer service too. But you might also think that not enough people know about your killer product. So it’s time for some good old fashioned, hard-core SEO.

One of the most difficult tasks in all of SEO is finding and choosing the best keyphrase to target.

Take a look at the Performancing sidebar. We link to pMetrics with “Site Analytics” – a poor choice in my view (and a poor choice that I made several months ago).

There are much better options. For example:

  1. Blog Stats
  2. Blog Statistics
  3. Site Stats
  4. Site Statistics
  5. Web Stats
  6. Web Statistics
  7. Website Stats
  8. Website Statistics

In other words, I think people are much more likely to do searches on things like “stats for my blog” then “analytics for my blog”

Now some of you might say to me, just target all of those phrases. And it’s true. We could try that. But what I like to do as an SEO is “divide and conquer” – I like to focus in on one killer keyphrase at a time. A target keyphrase. Once I’ve conquered that keyphrase (by conquer I mean nothing less than top 3), I move on to the next one.

But the problem I always have is choosing which phrase to target. Sure, you can point me to this or that tool. But I know about your tools. I just don’t always know how to use them to choose the best among good options.

So let me ask you this: as I put in place a major SEO campaign for pMetrics, what should I target? Is there any under-developed niche (blog stats)? Is one word (stats) better than another (statistics)? If so, why? If not, why not?

14 thoughts on “Choosing The Target Keyphrase for pMetrics”

  1. Raj, great point.

    Let’s link to pMetrics using the following 5 anchor texts, in order of priority:

    Blog Statistics
    Blog stats
    Blog Traffic Statistics
    Blog Traffic Stats
    Website statistics

    (oh, feel free to throw in the word “free” to any of those)

  2. This is what I said above, that I would go after “blog stats”. Get the SE ranking for it and then use anchor text on other sites to spread that term, make it more popular. Many of us have content networks and could probably link to PMetrics using a limited set of anchor text.

  3. I think Ahmed is right. Let’s start with brand, and then push out to capture more of the audience later.

  4. What I did first was entering all 8 keyword combinations above in the “Keyword Variations” field I turned off “Use synonyms” though this did not seem to have the desired effect, as synonyms showed up in the results.

    Then I clicked on the “Advertiser Competition” column heading to use this as the sort criterion.
    The outcome was that “Web statistics” and “Website statistics” seem to be highly competitive. The other combinations did not show up in the results so I started over each time using two combinations, e.g. “Blog statistics”, “Blog stats” and so on. That’s the way how I came to my interpretation of the keyword competition.

  5. yaph,
    can you explain your method for discovering “order of competition” in the AdWords tool? I can seem to duplicate your results.

  6. Instead of going after web site statistics, I’d go for blog statistics (anchor text on Perf) or blog traffic stats (varied anchor text from other sites linking to Perf).

    1) pMetrics is about blog stats, not web site stats. Yes, a lot of people who run blogs are going to type in website or web site instead of blog, but what’s the core identity of pMetrics? Blog Stats, right? So you’d go after that FIRST, and the rest later.

    Branding on SEs is very important IMO. For e.g. A blog I bought last year was #1 a key search term in Google. That value alone paid for the blog, not in terms of direct type-in traffic but the networking and advertising opportunities that arose from other bloggers and advertisers searching for that term and landing on my blog.

    2) Perf is already ranking well for blog statistics (#6 pMetrics and #9 Perf) and blog stats (#7 Perf). Bumping this up to top 3 within the next 2-3 months and to #1 by the end of the season with a dedicated promotion campaign is achievable.

    There’s value in conquering a small niche first and then going after the big guns (statcounter, google analytics, etc). By all means, competing with GA is a worthy goal But how about catching the easy fish first, building momentum and then gunning for the big sharks?

    Think about it

  7. “free” will definitely be used in searching for these terms. In fact, I use it when searching, but I’m a math geek and use “web metrics” or “web analytics”.

    This is one of those situations where you need to cover a lot of different terms. Since Perf has high authority, we can talk about most of these terms here and still rank well.

    That said, if we have to choose just a few to start with, I guess it should be “website statistics” and “web statistics”. I’m guessing “analytics” will rank low.

  9. Honestly I would have gone with blog stats as well, just from the nature of what Performancing is, but with numbers like that I think you should go big. With any luck it will inspire people to create more blogs, and possibly make the Performancing community grow even more. I’m all for you guys going for the term that draws the most traffic. I would love to see an example of SEO in action. As an aspiring web designer I could use the lesson in SEO.

  10. Acording to Google’s Keyword Tool the order of competition for AdWords is as follows:

    • Web Statistics
    • Website Statistics
    • Blog Statistics

    “stats”, and “site” used in compinations to not seem to be highly competitive. I use “Advanced Web Statistics and Tracking Tool” as the title attribute in my affiliate image link 😉

  11. Sorry, Ryan. you beat me to commenting.

    I would have said go after “blog stats”, but seeing the numbers, I’m surprised. Yeah, I spell it “website”, too – not “web site”. It’s one word, originally, but with everything in language, there are eventually variations. And the Internet propagates it.

    Question is, if someone wants a metrics solution for their blog, would they actually look for “website stats” or “web site stats”? If you go after the one most likely to be searched for in relation to PMetrics, you can still use synonyms and get ranked in the SERPs. At least, that’s what I understand.

  13. So no one’s going to give it a shot. I thought I’d let other’s pipe-up before I spilled the beans.

    Here’s how I do it:

    Go here:
    http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/

    Score each search:

    1. Blog Stats – 245
    2. Blog Statistics – 207
    3. Site Stats – 2,814
    4. Site Statistics – 1,407
    5. Web Stats – 5,093
    6. Web Statistics – 7,581
    7. Website Stats – nonexistent (apparently no-one else spells website like me)
    8. Website Statistics – nonexistent

    And in the process I discovered:

    9. web site statistics – 18,127
    10. web site traffic statistics – 5,198
    11. web site statistics software – 959

    So this analysis shows me that it is clearly best to pursue the search terms “web site statistics” and its derivatives “web site statistics software” and “web site traffic statistics”

    But what about competition? Ah, hell. Screw competition. At Performancing we like to go BIG.

  14. To help make things concrete, let me ask the following questions:

    1. Which phrase gets the most searches?
    2. Which phrase is the least competitive?
    3. Which phrase will be the most effective (the best combination of 1 and 2)

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