Ask Kalena

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Hi Kalena

I feel like I am stuck with my keyword research.

I am researching SEO keywords for an Australian business that specializes in tree removal and tree felling. The keywords I chose for them were “tree removal” and “tree lopper” however when I enter these into Keyword Discovery for Australia I get nothing (although “tree removal” comes up quite a bit for global search).

These keywords best describe the business and although the tree removal operator prefers not to be called a tree lopper he is happy for me to use this term for search engine purposes. Yet when entering these keywords into Google it seems a lot of competitor sites come up. I am confused! Can you help?

Louise

Hello Louise

In my experience, most keyword research tools (such as Keyword Discovery or WordTracker) are highly inconsistent or downright inaccurate when it comes to regional search databases.

What I would do is to use the global database when choosing the best keywords to target and then see how they go in terms of bringing you traffic. You can tweak the keywords as you go based on the response and traffic you get. I would start broad e.g. “tree removal”, “tree felling” and then narrow your market based on the responses you receive e.g. “tree removal [city]“ or “tree felling services”.

Another way to measure your potential regional market is to set up a basic pay per click campaign using Google AdWords, targeting Australia only and targeting the keywords you wish to test. Then monitor the number of impressions that your keywords get. Note I said impressions and not clicks. Set the budget low or design your ads in a way you don’t necessarily attract clicks (so it’s a cheap and dirty experiment).

The number of impressions you get per week will give you a ballpark idea of how many Australian searchers are looking for those particular keywords in Google per week.

Dear Kalena…

I’ve had my online store for 2 yrs now and have been stuck on a PageRank of 2 it seems forever. Since my income from this site is often the only income coming in at times for my family (economy in our area is awful) I’d like to increase my Page Ranking to increase sales. I’d love to be a PR5. I am no computer genius but know enough to improve my site with the right guidance and information. Your help and knowledge would be much appreciated.

Penny

Dear Penny

While there is certainly a correlation between PageRank and high quality websites, there are a few issues if you focus purely on PageRank.

Firstly, Google may be crunching the numbers behind the scenes but the publicly visible Toolbar PageRank is only updated a few times a year, so what you see may not always be entirely accurate.

Secondly, a high PageRank doesn’t necessarily mean higher rankings in the search results – I’ve seen some great sites with low PR outrank crappy sites with higher PR.

So saying you’d like a PageRank of 5 to help increase your online conversions is like going to a car salesman and asking to buy a red car…

Some people think that red cars go faster, therefore if a car is fast it is most likely sporty and by association, sports cars are often rather sexy and luxurious.

So in actual fact, what you may want is a lightning fast, motoring masterpiece that’s mechanical brilliance is overshadowed only by its sexy aesthetics… but instead you drive away in a Citroën 2CV – a vehicle that takes the better part of a day to get from 0-60 and looks like a Transformer mated with a toad – simply because you asked for a car that was ‘red’ instead of ’sporty’.

The point is – don’t just ask how to increase your PR – ask how you can increase your rankings, traffic and conversions instead.

So what should you be focusing on?

The first thing you should look at (from an SEO perspective) are your keywords. You could have a PR8 site and plenty of random clicks, but if you’re targeting the wrong keywords you won’t sell a thing.

The next thing to work on are your inbound links. Think of an inbound link as a ‘vote’ for your website. The more votes you have, the more popular your website will seem to the search engines.

Focus on semantically relevant links (ie. links from sites that provide similar products/services or sites that contain information that would be relevant to your users).

Sure, if you manage to gain a lot of high quality links, it will have a positive impact on your PageRank, but the goal should always be to increase your sites exposure and relevant traffic instead of gaining an extra point on an infrequently updated little green Google bar.

Once your keywords, content and links are all looking good, the final thing to work on is your website usability. While this may not strictly fall under the SEO banner, there’s really no point optimising a site to gain more traffic if you cannot convert the clicks into sales.

Hopefully this will help you start focusing on the most effective SEO factors instead of just trying to improve your PageRank.

Cheers

Peter Newsome
SiteMost SEO Services

Dear Kalena…

I’d like to target National as well as International Market for my Internet Business. Moreover I want to get ranked high in all data-centers of Google. I’ve already registered my website business with Google local business center. Now I’m in confusion that does Google consider my website for local market only as I’ve business listed in Google local business center? What if i’d like to get high rankings in all data centers of Google? Should i remove my business from Google local business center to get desired results? Please share your thoughts.

Thanks.
Steve

Hi Steve,

Simply having your business listed with Google Places (formerly known as the Google Local Business Center) will not limit the ability of your site to achieve good rankings in other parts of the U.S or internationally.  It will however make it easier for you to achieve local rankings and can significantly improve your local profile, traffic and sales.

Even without a Google Places listing You are naturally more likely to achieve higher rankings for local queries because :

1. there is probably going to be significantly less competiton and
2. Google tends to favour local providers (because people tend to favour local providers).

Unless your product/service is very specialised it is probably unlikley that you will achieve high rankings in ALL data centers, as one of the reasons these centers are in place is to provide customised results to meet different regional needs.  I doubt that you could expect to achieve high rankings for an English website in Japan for example.

To compete nationally you would generally need to have a more established site – preferably with national  content and links from other nation-wide authority websites.  To achieve consistently high rankings internationaly you would ideally have multiple sites in different countries – each targeting the specific needs of that country (keywords, language, links etc).

Andy Henderson
Ireckon Web Marketing

Hi Kalena

I have uploaded my XML sitemap to Google, Yahoo and more recently Bing, thanks to your blog post about the Bing Webmaster Center.

However, I’m wondering if Ask.com accept XML sitemaps and if so, how do I upload mine to Ask?

thanks
Georgia

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Hello Georgia

Yes, Ask.com DO support XML Sitemap submissions. Here’s a blurb about it from their Webmaster Help area:

“Yes, Ask.com supports the open-format Sitemaps protocol. Once you have prepared a sitemap for your site, add the sitemap auto-discovery directive to robots.txt, or submit the sitemap file directly to us via the ping URL”

The ping URL is as follows:

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

To add your sitemap to your robots.txt file, simply include this line:

Sitemap: http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

Actually it’s not just Ask that supports the addition of sitemaps in robots.txt. Did you know that both Google and Yahoo also support that method of sitemap delivery?

You can either submit your sitemap via the search engine’s appropriate submission interface (e.g. Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer, Bing Webmaster Center) or specify your sitemap location in your robots.txt file as per the above instructions.

Hi Kalena,

A friend of mine with a sailing business in the U.S. has found that many of her current clients come from Canada. Can you suggest ways for her to concentrate more SEO efforts in Canada? She’s reaching them via social media with FB and Twitter, but wonders if there is more she can do via SEO to encourage this Canadian trend.

Thank you!

Amy

Hi Amy,

It’s great that your friend understands enough about her customers to realise that a significant proportion of them are coming from Canada (I’m often shocked by just how little some of the business owners I come across know, or even care about their customers).  It’s not clear from your question though whether Canadian customers make up the majority of her business, or whether she is just trying to increase the volume of Canadian sales.

If you want to boost the Canadian sales I would suggest looking a bit deeper into your analytics to determine any differences in the behavior of the Canadian vs US customers. If there are certain keywords, or certain areas of the site that are favoured by the Canadians,  optimising the site for these is likely to result in improved traffic and sales from Canada.

Adwords Pay per Click is also an obvious strategy for targeting specific geographic markets.

If Canadians outnumber U.S. Customers then perhaps the site is not showing up well for more localised searches, and your friend may be better focusing on Local Search Optimisation to improve local (U.S) customer sales.

There are obviously all sorts of other factors that may influence whether your website or the service you offer appeals more to Canadians or U.S.  customers, but the better you understand your customers, their search behaviours, their motivations, and what influences their decision to buy, the better placed you are to improve your sales and enquiries from both markets.

Andy Henderson

Ireckon Web Marketing