Picking Keywords For Your Crafts Site

If you've never considered or picked out what your keywords or niche might be, do it now! Better late than never!

What are "your keywords"?
They are the words or phrases that you will be targeting your site with. If you pick something very generic like "crafts" or "crafting" you'll be hard pressed to crack into any search results unless you're, well, Martha Stewart. But if you pick something more specific like "glue gun crafts" or "handmade felted crafts" or "embossed stamped cards" you'll have a better chance.

Better chance at what?
Coming up when someone searches for that keyword. Making yourself visible to an interested audience. If someone is putting together a round up of Halloween crafts and you have an awesome tutorial for a set of Halloween pipe cleaner crafts, how will they find you to include you?

How do I pick my keywords or niche?
Your blog or site is what it is. You sell what you sell, which means that your keywords have already been determined, you just have to determine which variations you can go after. (These keywords are going to be site wide and you'll use them over and over again, all throughout the site. Individual posts, tutorials, products and articles should have their own unique keyword that they are targeting but should be similar to your main set of keywords.)

(I'm going to use a great site as a real life example: Dollar Store Crafts)

So- take a step back:
What is your site about?
Crafts

What kind of crafts?
Inexpensive, creative, cheap crafts

Is there anything special or unique about these crafts other than price?
All my materials come from the dollar store.

Anything else?
They're awesome.

Your keyword options are: dollar store crafts, cheap crafts or inexpensive crafts.

Should I pick all of those?
No, pick one that you really want and then a secondary one.

How do I pick?
You can pick a couple of different ways. The keyword chosen should best reflect the content that is already on your site. If you used the words "dollar store" more than "this is an easy craft" and far more times than "this is a cheap craft" go with the keyword "dollar store crafts."

Pick a niche that not only appeals to you and what you do, but also what people will actually look for. Going after a really complex and long keyword will make you just as invisible as going after a very generic one. So "cheap easy dollar store crafts" or "easy crafts from the dollar store" aren't great choices of keywords to target.

Another way is based on volume of searches. Use Google's free keyword tool to see how often people search on your proposed keyword choices. You can enter in the keywords you're thinking about or enter in the URL for the website or webpage and Google will suggest to you what they think is relevant as far as keywords.

So in the case of Dollar Store Crafts- their keywords might be: dollar store crafts, cheap crafts or inexpensive crafts. The reason being that their unique niche pertains to price more than it does variety of crafts, skill level or intended audience.

Now you try!
Enter in "crafts" and search and Google will return 150 craft related keywords (and more!) for you to go through and see how often people search for them on a monthly basis (locally- the USA) or globally. It will also show you how many other sites are competing for the same keywords in paid search. Just hover your mouse over the light green bar next to a keyword and you'll see stats like "very high advertiser competition" and "average advertiser competition." Since these stats are related to paid search competition, you're concern is the with local search volume number. We'll address paid search later on in our series.

There are also additional statistics you can explore in the "Choose columns to display" menu regarding like trends for highest volume (which month) and search volume trends. Play around with it. At any time, hover over the little question mark icon anywhere on the page for more information about that statistic.

The match type drop down is set to "broad" by default. This means that Google is showing you results that are based on the keyword you've entered and not just letter by letter. It's counting searches for variations on the keyword "crafts." This means that searches not listed in that first 150 are counted and categorized within those 150. The keyword "easy crafts" is also counting searches for "easy crafts for adults" and "fun easy crafts." If you want to see what the volume is for the keyword you are targeting exactly, choose "exact" in the drop down menu. The number of searches should go down quite a bit.

For the purposes of this exercise, I recommend experimenting with the broad match option. Check out the Google tutorial if you would like to learn more about match types.

Stay tuned for our next tutorial- What to do with your keywords!

Tags: glue+gun+crafts, crafts, search+engine+optimization, crafting,