First, I decide what the primary, secondary, and tertiary words will be for my site. These three words will form the backbone of the featured site content (i.e., the Wordpress pages). The primary keyword has to meet some hard-and-fast criteria (and the secondary and tertiary keywords should come as close as possible to those criteria as well). For those of you who are interested and know the keyword research acronyms, it goes like this: (For those of you who don't give a fig, just skip over this next eye glaze opp.)
- At least 49 SEOT (essentially, the number of daily visitors you can expect for the exact-match phrase)
- Less than 10,000 SEOC. (Okay, I fudge a little if the SEOT is really good and the competition is like 11 or 12K) But I really do NOT want to make my job of ranking any harder than it needs to be.
- AWCPC (Adwords Cost Per Click) of at least .85
- At least 9 or 10 Adwords advertisers appearing for the keyword when entered into Google.
- Competition analysis in Market Samurai (my preferred keyword research tool) showing a lot of green in the competition graph. (I'll talk about this more another time. I don't want to get bogged down in PageRank discussion right now.)
In the case of the portable car heater site, the primary keyword was, duhhhh, portable car heater. The secondary is heated car seat covers. The tertiary is electric garage heaters.
Are all three of these, technically speaking, actually portable car heaters? Noooooooo. (I could have done actual product brand names, and most product reviewers do--it was just slim pickings to try that with this particular product niche.)
But if you think outside the box a bit, it actually works....and thinking outside the box helped me shape my site in a way that reflected the highest-traffic relevant keywords I found. Here's my thinking:
Someone whose heater is broken is not going to get by with just the little thing you plug into the lighter socket. They'll be looking for auxiliary devices that don't cost an arm and a leg. At least...I think so. I HAVE been in that position before. But it was before the Internet...so maybe I just would have gone and poured myself a stiff drink and waited for spring.
As for the actual research, now that I have my keywords, I do pretty much the same thing I do when I get hired to write articles. I go and grab whatever info I can find around the Web that looks helpful for each featured content page. Then I paste the salient points in no particular order into a Word document. I stare at it trying to figure out what's most important and what I'd be interested in knowing if I were a potential buyer. I try to figure out how I can make jargon understandable and boring product features talk easier for a casual reader to absorb. Ultimately, all of it gets distilled into my own words. And, since there's a lot of bad writing out there on the Web, that part just feels like editing, compressing, and re-shaping.
There's lots of good stuff on Yahoo Answers and Answerbag. Yahoo Answers in particular helped me a lot with this site. I saw how many people were going to the site asking if those little car heaters worked. They were mostly being told, no, just get your heater fixed. So, I took a spin on that....saying hey, I know you don't want to just be told to get your heater fixed. You're not dumb. You'd fix it right now if you could. So let's examine what these devices can and can't do for you.
Then, for details, you can go right into Amazon user reviews. After all, the buyer is going to go right there anyway, right? If you can't recommend products that have high star ratings, I think it's important to be able to explain why. It's also important to tell your buyer when you've spotted some products that ought to be avoided. Or that have safety issues.
Scribd.com has some very informative documents posted by people trying to build a little street cred in their field. Not a bad place to look.
Wikipedia was good for getting an overview of how infrared heaters work. (This was the only part of the site that involved a technology discussion at all. I don't mind that--I like learning something new. And in this blog, I found out that infrared heat actually has healing effects upon the human body. Cool.) Anyway, I felt it was worth explaining the technology. Otherwise, people probably wouldn't believe it uses 50% less electricity than the old-fashioned kind of space heater.
One last thing. On Yahoo Answers, some people recommended specialty sites for the products. So, I did go and check out a couple of specialty automotive sites in this case. I found out some do-it-yourself installation steps for the one device that wasn't just a an easy plug-in.
I let Amazon do some of my work for me. I got a plug-in called ReviewAzon. A paid plug-in, but I'll be using it across so many sites, I believe it'll be well worth it for the time it saves me in listing the products. ReviewAzon pulls info about the product right into the site. That way, it'll always show an up-to-date Amazon price.
So that's just a bit about how the research is done (and how the field of research is limited...which is, for me, the most important part!)
My next task--and the part I'm still learning--is building the traffic. As I mentioned, I want to get this thing set up so that I don't have to do much for it once it's launched. Sure, I'm happy to water my little seedling and pull up some weeks. But I want that seedling to be hardy enough to put down a good root system even if I'm not standing over it saying, "Come on, little seedling. Grow...spread your roots...put out blossoms."
I still have a whole lot to learn. But now, at least, I know what to do if my car heater breaks and my garage is freezing cold.
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