7th September 2008

So you've racked your brain for the search phrases you think people will use to find your website, you've asked around, been through the meta tags of your competitors and have a decent sized list of around 150 phrases.

Now you can either start optimising your site for all these phrases and potentially spend time and effort optimising for phrases that are either overly competitive or have poor search volume or you can follow these steps to work out which phrases in your list are worth the time and effort!

Create a nice new spreadsheet in your software of choice and list your phrases in Column A.

In Column B, we are going to list the number of searches per month for each phrase.

In Column C, we will list the number of results returned for each search phrase, this is shown at the top of Google's results page.

In order to provide a clear index of where the opportunities lay, in the fourth Column D, we will list the Column B entry squared, then divided by the Column C entry (=B5^2/C5).

Now do a descending sort on your index Column D to list them in order of attractiveness.

Phrases with good search volume and lower levels of competition will be prioritised in the index Column D.

Happy optimising!