Missed Opportunity #1:
Confusion about the difference between Keyword Research versus Market Research is a huge missed opportunity because Market Research gives you the much needed context for your keywords. Without a context for your keywords you might be targeting terms with different market segments, such as different demographics, and not even realize it.
Listen to Theme Zoom Architect Sue Bell and Co-Inventor Russell Wright Podcast on this Topic:
Podcast: Keyword Research and Market Research are Not the Same Thing
Market research allows you to “zoom out” and see the entire picture of your market. From this view, you can follow the money, understand the competition, understand what each market segment means to your bottom line and decide which segments of the market you want to own. Generally this is a combination of terms that are easy to rank for as well as those more difficult that will require effort and time, but once owned, will be highly profitable. A silo structured website created from well defined market segments will make sense to both your visitors and the bots, you will rank higher and have better conversions because there is a coherent, well thought out plan to your site and your entire marketing strategy.
Low hanging fruit, on the other hand, is a disparate collection of assorted keywords that are easy to rank for and might just be addressing your target audience. You generally have to struggle to create a seamless context for these terms and your marketing strategy is typically haphazard because you lack the understanding needed to create a focused campaign.
If you do not understand the difference between “low hanging fruit” keywords and “top level online keyword themes” your website keyword strategy will almost certainly be less than optimal.
Also See Beyond Low Hanging Fruit
Some keyword tools can return hundreds even thousands of keywords. But a keyword tool that doesn’t help you find which themes are most important for the big “online” picture is useless.
Not knowing this is more than just a hassle; it is downright painful. I am speaking from personal experience. This confusion is one of the reasons our team created Krakken and the Theme Zoom Tool Suite.
Before we move on, let’s clarify some terms:
Vertical Market:
A basic understanding of this term is especially important because one of your primary Krakken tools is called VOMA “Vertical Online Market Analysis.”
A vertical market is a particular industry or group of enterprises in which similar products or services are developed and marketed using similar methods. Examples of broad vertical markets are: insurance, real estate, banking, electronics, heavy manufacturing, retail, transportation, hospitals, and government.
(There are several other definitions for the phrase “vertical market” that would just confuse your because I am talking about vertical markets in the context of keyword research and broad keyword phrases).
Generally speaking, thinking about your more competitive short tail keywords in terms of verticals makes sense when your intention is to build a Website Silo Architecture that engages dozens (if not hundreds) of mid to short tail keywords that are less vertical than your top-level competitive themes.
For example “car insurance” is an example of a short level keyword. It has over 1 hundred million competing pages on Google whereas “car insurance companies Arizona” has just over 1 million and is a geo-targeted “niche” rather than a broad vertical keyword.
In this example, both keywords are in the same vertical market, and “car insurance” would be hierarchically higher in the vertical market than “car insurance companies Arizona” because “car insurance” is a broader keyword whose search engine results pages would theoretically include all of the search engine results pages for “car insurance companies Arizona”:
Learning about online vertical market research as it connects to the technical aspects of ranking for “broad” keyword phrases provided me early on with a global strategy for performing keyword research, but I needed more than just a working theory.
Before the existence of Theme Zoom Krakken and it’s LSI technology, there was still a problem when it came to applying knowledge of broad keyword phrases and vertical market research in order to serve clients.
As I said before, with traditional keyword tools, it was almost impossible to know the difference between a “high level theme” keyword and a “low hanging fruit” keyword (sometimes called “high KEI” keywords).
Low Hanging Keyword Fruit Gets a Cold Shower
High level theme keywords are keywords that are worth spending the time and money to own. Low hanging fruit keywords are often times not even worth a meta-tag and description. They are still very useful to have on your website, but it is important to put them into perspective within the overall structure of your website, blog network, or inbound link campaign. You can often times rank for these keywords with a simple blog post or an article located lower (or deeper) in your website.
You need a way to SYSTEMATICALLY PRIORITIZE the value and location of a keyword within the hierarchy of your online vertical keyword market. You need to give attention to “first things first” and everything else will fall into place with much greater ease. This is what VOMA (vertical online market analysis) is all about as well as the Silo Blueprint function of Krakken.
With fragmented keyword tools, there is usually no way to understand the relationships between these two species of keywords: (low hanging fruit and high hanging fruit). And worse yet, you will not know how to prioritize the amount of time you spend with each type as you build your online business.
The “big picture” (online vertical market analysis) includes knowing where (on your website) a keyword should live in relationship to another keyword within a similar Market Category.
There have been almost no keyword research tools on the market that really took this sort of “big picture thinking” into account. Although there are a few knock-offs trying to follow in our footsteps, very few of them have the technical integration and programming staff to integrate the authentic co-occurrence matrix or basic latent semantic analysis.
There are some services available that have tried to deliver a global online market view, but they are incredibly expensive. Services like Hit Wise will provide you with online vertical market keyword research data, but you need to pay tens of thousands of dollars to acquire this information. These services do not really focus on the technical aspects of keyword research, but more on where your current traffic comes from and where the traffic goes when it leaves your website. They generally have intimate deals with ISPs (internet service providers) around the United States in order to get keyword data directly from ISP hubs. But these types of services will not tell you how to develop a Vertical Online Market Architecture allowing you to “Swallow Your Market Whole.”
One client contract I prepared, which included Hit Wise data, had a twenty five thousand dollar price tag associated with it. This was the low end of the Hit Wise offering. There is nothing wrong with using a huge vertical market research and online competitive analysis firm like Hit Wise,but this data does not necessarily integrate into the technical keyword and website architecture level. It is good for competitive analysis after a large website is profitable, and is up and running.
Traditional keyword research only scratches the “Tip of the Iceberg” when it comes to “Swallowing an Entire Keyword Market”:
Now that we have defined “Missed Opportunity #1″ let me explain how Krakken Solves the problem:
We solved many online vertical research problems by creating the Krakken VOMA (vertical online market analysis) module.
To start, we’ll walk through creating a cluster and theme in Krakken. A cluster can have many uses, but the first definition you will give it is to represent your vertical market.
Next, create a theme; type in a Broad keyword, phrase or Vertical Market Theme. Themes represent all the different market segments in this market. Typically the first theme is broad, generally speaking you drill into the vertical market term that this cluster represents. However you will do on to put many themes into this cluster, until you fell you have thoroughly explored all the most important segments within this market. The term you enter on this screen is the seed term for the drill and will become what we refer to as the “parent theme” for this theme:
Delete any SEPS (search engine proven synonyms) that are not appropriate for your (or your client’s) business model. We recommend deleting all of them during the first phase so that you can have a clear, granular picture of the competition and money running through this market segment.
In the more advanced phases this step is used to add any terms that you want to use as synonyms, either by conforming to the market or by redefining it, such as ‘chocolate’, ‘peanut butter’ and ‘peanut butter cup’ might be a synonymic set for Reese’s.
Krakken will search the internet finding between 60,000 and 80,000 keywords for the average vertical market theme; slightly fewer for smaller markets. This data is pulled fresh each time your drill is run, finding the latest keywords and checking for updated cost, traffic and competing page data. Krakken then performs specific LSI, cost and competition filter analysis to determine which of these terms represent the most prominent market segments contained within, or slightly tangent to, your parent theme. It will also show you the markets that contain your parent theme as a market segment. In this way you get a visual of the hierarchy of your most important terms. Here you see that “loans” is the market that contains your parent theme “payday loans”. Market segments of “payday loans” is found in the level below market, in this case “instant payday loans”, payday advance loans” and “cashadvance”.
“Payday loans” has as a ‘sibling’ “payday loan”, meaning that these two terms have an similar scope of conversation, having the same classification, Market Category, in our proprietary keyword market category classification system (See image below).
Krakken also shows you the value of all the keywords in this theme in the upper right corner. Total Search Market Value represents the value if you were to be ranked in the top position on the search engines for all the “interesting” terms (see next image). This value is broken down into “Organic Market Value” and PPC Market Value” underneath the Total Search Market Value so that you can see how important it is to be thinking in terms if natural rankings and not jut pay per click:
Below the graphical image, Krakken also provides you with specific data about the Theme Market Analysis keywords that appears on the graph plus additional “interesting” terms. All of this is displayed on the same page as the visual graph for easy analysis:
There are additional screens that show trending, top ranked competitors, and the white paper that gives a clear picture of what is required to rank for the parent theme.
Video: Vertical Market Total Search Market Value (what is the entire market worth?)
Once you have selected the market segments that you want to include in your website, you will begin the process of building a Silo Website Blueprint integrating these most profitable and important theme clusters and keyword synonyms. The fact that these themes are associated market segments will create a coherent context that will reinforce their meaning to the search engines and make sense to visitors navigating your site.
Most of your clients competitors are light years behind when it comes to this sort of research methodology. Overkill? Maybe. Profitable? Absolutely.
The image above shows the outline of your blueprint, with the silo parent themes in the violet bubbles and the article parent themes in the white bubbles underneath. You can see the silo structure emerging, though this is not an accurate representation of the linking structure. For that, Krakken produces an HTML sample website complete with meta examples, menu linking structures and supporting keywords for each page.
The supporting keywords, selected by LSI technology to be relevant to you article theme as well as the silo theme in general, further aid creating the context that assists your rankings. These terms, as well as the article themes themselves, tend to be chosen based on ease of ranking and value to your bottom line. In other words, they have all the important aspects of KEI while still creating the context and theme effect.
And this is the difference between Market Research and Keyword Research that tends to focus only on KEI, missing the big picture entirely.
Theme Zoom Krakken is an integrated application suite that radically combines Market Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Keyword DNA Creation, Automated Silo Structured Blueprint and Website Development.
Learn more about these and many other advanced keyword and site building processes by signing up for a Krakken membership at Theme Zoom.
Russell Wright and the Theme Zoom Team
No Comments