Step 6: Prune and Prioritize Your Keyphrases
Remove Very Popular and Unpopular Keyphrases
Using the data from the Overture Keyword Selector Tool, sort your list of keyphrases in order of traffic volume, from highest to lowest.
From that sorted list, consider deleting any keyphrases that generate too many or too few searches. Very popular keyphrases attract too much commercial competition to be cost-effective, while low-traffic keyphrases generally aren't worth the marketing effort. As an example, CharityGuide.org's policy is to target keyphrases that generate between 2,000 to 20,000 searches per month on Yahoo. If you have access to more money, time, or volunteers than CharityGuide.org, you might want to set a more ambitious upper traffic limit.
To put this pruning in perspective, consider the keyphrase "nurse malpractice," which generates approximately 200 searches per month via Yahoo. If you optimized a webpage for "nurse malpractice" and were lucky enough to get click-thrus from 2% of the people who searched for information using that keyphrase, you'd receive only 200 x 2% = 4 visitors per month from Yahoo searches. Since Yahoo represents approximately 25% of the search traffic, you could look forward to 12 additional visitors per month from Google and other search engines. But, that's still not worth the optimization effort.
Exception: If you plan a pay-per-click campaign, don't ignore the low-traffic keyphrases for advertising purposes because specialized keyphrases are among the least competitive and best targeted. However, you may need to leverage thousands of very specialized keyphrases in order to generate a meaningful amount of website traffic.
Remove Out-of-Scope Keyphrases
Next, delete the keyphrases from your list that are out-of-scope for your website or advocacy goals.
To rank at the top of search engines, you will need to create webpages that are so authoritative and compelling that they attract a considerable number of hyperlinks from other websites. If you can't or won't develop a customized webpage for a particular keyphrase, then prune it from your list.
Prioritize the Remaining Keyphrases
The keyphrases that remain should be prioritized based on a combination of traffic volume and degree of importance to your advocacy goals.
Ideally, you will target at least 100 keyphrases and develop a separate, customized webpage for each one. Most internet websites that receive enormous free traffic from Google and Yahoo consist of at least 100 customized webpages with link-worthy content.
