Twinkly's SEO for Beginners *day 2*

Hello lovely readers. You are viewing Day Two of our joint venture into improving our shops Google Search results. I had a GREAT response to the first post yesterday and I'm really happy that everyone is having fun 'word-storming' (Thanks, KariOriginal!)

Necklace by KariOriginal

Right, so now you should have loads of words on a piece of paper. Most of these are probably not going to be helpful in terms of SEO, we need to weed them down. However, you might find them useful when writing interesting descriptions of your items, or describing your shop on your blog, so don't throw the list away after todays task!

We are going to look at our words and find out what Google thinks of them. Luckily, Google provides us with a great tool for this.

Google Keyword Tool

I would recommend starting with a very basic word. So pick a BIG word for your shop, knitting, jewellery, art, print, gift.

The tool will come back with a chart. The first entry in the chart is the word you are having a look at. You'll probably need another bit of paper, or if you are like me and love any excuse for using a highlighter, you could highlight words that come back with great results.

So, we are making a note of 'Monthly Searches' first. I would imagine that the first word you try will have over 100,000 searches. This means that people have searched that word either alone or in combination with other words a total of 100,000+ times in the past month. Imagine ranking as FIRST! 100,000 people will see your result! Around 40% of people will click the first result. We'll talk about getting people to click YOUR result tomorrow.

Now, you'll see below that is a huge bunch of other words in combinations. So you'll see 'Art print' 'Costume Jewellery' and other phrases. Notice that the monthly searches is lower.

The second thing to look at is 'Competition'. The more full that little bar, the more competition for those vital first and second page spots. Now, here is your task.

Go through your list of words from yesterday in combination with a 100,000+ results word. So I might search JEWELRY (American spellings always have higher searches. This isn't a time to be patriotic.) and a word I found yesterday with my word cloud. SWEET JEWELRY.

Oh dear. It's come up telling me only 82 searches for Sweet Jewelry. It's also telling me some other phrases that are getting more hits. So I'm going to note them down and move on. Competition is very low.

You'll need to carry on trying out combinations now. Ideally I would be looking for Monthly Searches of around 1,000 with around a half full bar for 'Competition' It might not happen that way, especially if you sell especially unusual items, but it's something to aim for.

You can try all sorts of combinations, even if they don't seem obvious at first. The key is to find a selection of five to ten words or combinations of words that go well with the majority of your items, have good monthly searches and relatively low competition.

I'm going to use a member of the Craft Britannia team as an example here, I hope they don't mind. My friend StupidCats sells sweet felted cats and beautiful cat-related art.

So, a quick search shows HUGE searches for CAT and ART. These people are not necessarily looking for feline art. But did you know that 1,200 people are searching for CAT ART monthly? And the competition is less than half. I'm happy to see she has this in her titles anyway - because over 1,200 people want Cat Art every month. She should definitely be getting a share of this traffic.

Get your five to ten highly searched, low competition words and phrases ready, and come back tomorrow :-)

Katie x

I also want to say a huge thank you to Craft Brit members for being very supportive with both this project and some personal issues that I have been having, you guys rock!