DAY 4: Grouping Your Keywords

If you haven’t completed day 3 of the SEO course, you can review: Qualifying Your Keywords before starting this post.

“If you don’t drive your business, you will be driven out of business.”

- B. C. Forbes -

Congratulation to you on your hard work

Today, we are going to use the nicely refined Keywords list we build yesterday and start to sort our keywords into different groups.

This task will give us a great head start as to how our site should be designed and which keywords should be optimized for, so be very serious with this task too.

Sorting Your Keywords by Search Volume

The very first step you should do with your list of Keywords, is to sort them by Volume.

In order to do that, just copy your keywords list into another spreadsheet with just the “keywords” and “Searches” columns as the picture on the next page.

The easiest and quickest way to sort your keyword is by using the sort & filter function of Excel.

Your keyword list should now be sorted from the keywords with the most search volume to the ones with the least search volume.

We now are going to create a new spreadsheet with 4 columns based on their search volume and copy our keywords in each of them accordingly:

• Over 100,000 – The main keywords for your site should be
  within this category.
• From 10,001 to 100,000 – The keywords that will define the
  different categories for your site should be in this category.
• From 3,001 to 10,000 – This category should contain potential
  primary keywords for your posts or pages on your site.
• Less than 3,000 – This category should contain potential
  secondary keywords for your posts or pages on your site.

Now I understand that some niche will still be viable with a much lower traffic volume, if this is your case, just scale down proportionally the numbers.

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DAY 3: Qualifying Your Keywords

If you haven’t completed day 2 of the SEO course, you can review: Building Your Keywords List before starting this post.

“High achievement always takes place in the framework of high expectation.”

- Charles Kettering -

It’s now time to refine your keywords list

Yesterday, you have collected a list of keywords as per the suggestions of different tools and software. That’s good, but not enough.

There’s a fact that a machine is nothing more than a machine in the end.

Only you will truly be able to tell whether or not a keyword is relevant to your site or not.

Reality Check

The real success of a site doesn’t come from traffic, it comes from targeted traffic.

There’s no point to optimize your site for a keyword that has nothing to do or very little with your site, you may get some one time traffic visitors alongside suffering a loss of relevancy and credibility as per the quality of your content.

If you are offering medicals services in Denver, there’s no point optimizing for “medical services in New York” just because it’s suggested by a keyword tool.

Why Qualifying Your Keywords?

There are two major reasons as to why you should qualify your
keywords:

1. As I just explained, to prevent time wasting by optimizing for irrelevant keywords.
2. To reassess your “real” potential traffic volume within your niche.

How to Quality Your Keywords?

Start by opening the keyword list you built yesterday, remember your list should look like that:

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NEIS – Part 2: What Do They Teach You In The Course?

I’ve just completed the NEIS course including going to the panel and getting my documentation approved. It was very exciting leading up to the day and also a very long anticipation since finishing the course material two weeks ago. Over the last two weeks it was time to finalise the business plan and to compile any other documentations required. By the time you go to the panel, you will have submitted:

• 2 bound copies of the business plan with attachments
• 2 copies of the executive summary

What Do They Teach In The Course?
Each BEC (Business Enterprise Centre) is different and they will have different trainers with different teaching styles. Essentially they have to follow the course outline provided from the government agencies. By the end of the course you will have compiled a business plan. Don’t fret though, because they provide you with a template and you just focus on getting the information into the business plan. The topics they cover over the few weeks to assist you with the business plan are:

• Management and Finance
• Marketing and Promotion
• Operations
• Insurances
• Presentation skills for the Panel

Management and Finance
This was a crucial component of the course and I found it quite easy to grasp as I seemed to find crunching numbers fun and naturally part of me (I loved Maths at school by the way). In saying this the most important part of finance I learnt was being able to work out how much it will cost to stay afloat in my new business and when would breakeven point occur? Knowing this gave a good indication for how realistic my expectations were and it is a goal for me to achieve.

Apart from learning how to calculate the breakeven point, there were other calculations required such as:

• Personal & business assets and liabilities
• Startup funds required
• Personal & business cost analysis
• Personal & business cashflow forecast
• Personal & business balance sheet forecast
• Business profit and loss forecast

All of these calculations required us to find exact numbers from our personal finances to come to an accurate forecast and helping us see what is viable for our new business. By the end of this section I found a lot of people struggled in the class and had to come to ask me because the trainer kept using me as an example. (I felt privileged to help and it did reinforce what I needed to know for myself)

The management section dealt with the entry and exit conditions of the business. We looked at how to ask minimise business risk through purchasing insurance and also making sure we have protection for our intellectual property. A lot of times businesses overlook these small little things, and when issues arise it may be too late. These could have been easily avoided if the appropriate business protections were in place from the start.

Marketing and Promotion
I enjoyed learning about this topic because it was the creative side of the business. It was the complete opposite of finance and was a fresh change. The trainer provided a lot of information and was very interactive with the class. She really impressed everyone when she remembered everyone’s name on the first day and could use our businesses as examples in all of the marketing topics she covered. The following topics covered in marketing were:

• Market research & market information
• The marketing mix (4 P’s)
• Product
• Price
• Promotion
• Place

It was very important to understand our market first and to do thorough research on what consumers wanted before approaching the market with your product or service. This allowed us to determine what our competitors were doing and if there was enough demand for our business to enter the market. I definitely found it applicable and learnt how to design a marketing strategy that would cater for my business.

Operations
There are some things in business that you just have to do, and it’s not dollar productive but important in keeping your business operations running. It’s the behind the scenes work, such as book keeping, tax, insurances, payroll, managing and analysing your finances and so forth. All of these components are essential in keeping the business running and this was the final topic in the course that we had to complete for the business plan. I found it to be quite bland but important and I’ve already decided to outsource the paperwork to a book keeper to allow me to spend more time on marketing and promoting the business.

Insurances
This was a very brief one hour talk from an Insurance Broker who offered advice on what necessary insurances were needed to run each and every one of our business. Each business had different needs and we were recommended to speak to seek Insurance Brokers to save time in finding the appropriate insurance for our business. For my business I only needed Public Liability Insurance which is compulsory before starting my business with NEIS. When I start to hire staff, I will add Worker’s Compensation Insurance and keep abreast of what protection I may need for this business later on.

Presentation skills for the Panel
In the third week of the course they brought in a professional speaker named Melanie Wass from Natural Consulting. She explained to us previously from other panel interviews most candidates did not perform well and they lacked strong presentation skills. Therefore they wanted us to succeed and hired Melanie to give us some basic pointers on how to sell our business to the panel and get approved to be on the NEIS program. Some of the questions we had to ask ourselves were:

• Who are you?
• What’s your business?
• What do you really do for people? (think benefit, think big)
• Who do you do it for? (who’s your main target market?)
• What’s your Tagline?
• Your 30 second pitch?

After answering those questions and writing them down, we were asked to memorise them and make sure we were prepared to present them to panel, as that’s what they will ask us. Additionally when Melanie told us that some people have turned up to the panel in T-shirt and shorts, I found it quite amusing. She emphasised to us the importance of presenting ourselves in business attire and projecting our voice clearly. I felt quite comfortable with everything she said and just waited until the day of the panel presentation.

Feedback And Comments
So after going through this comprehensive course I feel a lot more confident in starting my new business and will be keen to share more of my experiences with other. If you have any further questions about the course, please add your comments below.

Also, BEC have the following alliance partners supporting the NEIS programme that can assist you with the business and may have special packages for anyone part of the NEIS program:

Tyrone Shum
NEIS Participant