Mediaboss Marketing

In How to Find Profitable Keywords For Your Website, we discussed methods for researching and logging your keywords, determining the relative profitability per phrase and touched on the need to schedule your targeting to help produce a faster ROI.

The approach we used is to select long-term keywords but focus on complementary, long-tail phrases early on. The logic? It's easier to spend the money you're making than the money you're not so a path to faster ROI, even if it delays slightly the time frame for hitting maximum monthly revenue, is still desirable.

We ended the article last month touching on, but not getting into, the need to do some basic competitor research to prioritize your phrases. While we may know the profit-per-sale, this is only useful if we can also determine the estimated competition for the phrases we're looking at.

We also have to avoid analysis paralysis. With so much data available you could spend months looking into all the details of what's possible. Rather than put you through that, the goal is to help you make bulk decisions based on grouping data and making some educated assumptions.

Thus, you may not be right 100 percent of the time in all cases, but you'll have gained many hours/days/weeks of productivity so where you are right (the majority of the time) you'll win much bigger. Better to be top 3 for 10 phrases in 3 months and top 3 for 15 phrases in 7 months, especially given that you can now reinvest your profit in time and effort, and get those other 5 phrases faster.

Group your phrases further and cluster them by common attributes. By clustering keywords, I mean grouping the keywords into logical groups, such that the work towards one will positively impact the results of another. The profit example from the first article (linked to above) is a good one (done by instinct as opposed to intention) and so lets begin there.

We found in our research the following two phrases (the search volume is as reported by Google's AdWords Tool):

To fully understand the girth of data we'll be looking at, we'll have to imagine the full hierarchy of the site and all the products our mountain biking enthusiast has to deal with. In a simple form it would look like:

Home > Product Category > Product Sub-Category > Brand > Product > Accessories

Original post:
Keyword Clustering for Maximum Search Profitability