Page Planning Strategies

Now that I have a domain name picked out for my site, the next thing that I need to do is figure out what I will build on the site. It is very important to do this step to ensure that your site content is both useful and targeted to attract search engine traffic.

The key to this process is to create pages for a variety of purposes but still be sure to keep everything relevant to your main keyword phrase. As you move through this planning process, try to continually think about how everything will connect together on your site to make it easy to understand and use for your site visitors.

I'll be discussing the different page types in this chapter and also talking about where I come up with the ideas for the pages.

Keyword Pages

The easiest way to come up with ideas for pages on your site is to use the Google Keyword Planner. Although you could likely come up with enough ideas to fill an entire site using that, it is still important to use other sources for page ideas and be sure to carefully choose your keywords.

First, you obviously want to make sure that the keywords you are targeting are relevant to your primary keyword phrase. Many phrases may be relevant in some way, but ask yourself if they are truly a good fit for the overall purpose of your site.

I am building DownComforterGuide.com for this tutorial, so I want to keep my page topics in line with that basic idea. I could obviously cover tons of different things about down comforters, but I am really more interested in the topics that consumers are interested in before they purchase one.

In addition to relevance to my primary topic, I am also interested in finding the keywords with lower competition, so I will generally go for keywords that are under 1,000 monthly searches.

Since many of these topics for secondary pages on my site will be even more specific than the topic for my overall website, there is even a decent chance that search engine traffic for your target phrases may be very low. This is quite alright though, as long as they fit your site and offer some type of traffic potential that should be easy to obtain (after all, there won't be many people competing for these very low traffic phrases).

Another thing to consider is that these keywords may actually be valid for the other two types of pages that I will talk about next: product/brand pages and question/informational pages. It can be good to have some of those other page types that are targeting a keyword phrase that gets traffic, although not all of those pages need to target keywords (in fact, I believe it is good if some of them do not).

To start your keyword page research, simply search your primary keyword phrase in Google's Keyword Planner.

Once Google provides results for you, look at the ad group ideas. I briefly showed this to you at the end of the last lesson, but this time, I am looking to get some specifics and take notes.

I have shown pictures for all of the listed ad groups in my search so I can explain my thought process to you.

This list contains the ad group ideas, so these are just basic keyword ideas that Google has organized for me. With that said, I'm not looking to make a final decision here. Instead, I merely want to use these as the initial research to find the actual keyword phrases that I want to target.

The first thing that I do is to browse the ad group ideas and try to imagine all of them grouped together and organized even more.

For example, many of the initial ad group ideas like King, Queen and Twin are obvious references to bed sizes because comforters are sold in various sizes for different beds. Google actually has a Size Down group here, which should contain more references to those same keywords and other common size search phrases.

The comforter sizes are definitely a possibility for a page topic as part of my down comforter guide.

However, if all of the comforter products that I promote on my site are available in all sizes or even the most common sizes, then I might not want to use this as a basis for organizing my site - this could simply be a footnote for each comforter promotion page. I could still build an information page about sizes for the site though and simply link to it from the size footnotes.

Other ad group ideas that stand out as great candidates for this site are Fill, Thread Count, Alternative, Hypoallergenic, Summer and Lightweight. These all sound like topics that consumers may be interested in learning more about before they decide to buy a comforter, which obviously makes them match my primary keyword phrase.

Beyond those obvious ad groups, most of the remaining ad groups seem to occupy one of a few general categories: Pricing/Cost, Brands, Colors and Accessories. These could be additional points that I address in my buying guide on my site.

As you go through keywords for your own site, simply open up Notepad (if you use Windows) and take notes.

Instead of simply planning your pages based on the ad group ideas, it is actually a good idea to drill down a bit deeper into the actual keyword phrases that Google provides for those ad groups. This will tell you the phrases that people actually use in their searches for those ad groups, which can then be used on your own website to target pages to those phrases.

For example, if I go through the Alternative ad group, I'll find many different keywords that all reference basically the same thing. Here is a picture of just some of the words provided under this ad group:

With all of these keywords available for essentially the same subject, how do you pick one to target?

Personally, I will try to pick one out of the list to make it the primary keyword phrase of a page of my site or the content I'm writing. I will also take a look at the other keyword phrases in case some of them could work as secondary phrases or variations of my main phrase, which could simply be used within the content of the page.

When I am trying to select a primary keyword phrase to target for a specific page on my site, I will use the same selection strategies that I used to select the main keyword phrase of the entire site. This means that I want something that is low competition, which will likely be a lower traffic number (often 500 or less).

For this particular phrase, I like the look of “down alternative comforters”. That specific phrase receives 480 average monthly searches. However, within that exact phrase, you can actually find other phrases from this same list: down alternative comforter and down alternative.

Combined, those additional two phrases offer 5,000 monthly searches. I know the competition will be high on those phrases, so I don't expect to get a ranking anytime soon, but this could at least give me the possibility of ranking for those phrases in the future.

I also take notice of informational based search phrases that could appear in this list like “down alternative vs down comforter”. Even though the search traffic for this phrase is very low, it could still be worth making a page based on this phrase or even just devoting a section of my “down alternative comforters” page to target this additional phrase.

If you find that you need more information on a topic, feel free to search additional phrases on Google to try to get different results or more in-depth results on a particular topic. I did this for the colors and also for the Pinzon brand to try to come up with some additional targeting options and/or ideas.

Product / Brand Pages

Although you may be able to find some keyword phrases for products and/or brands in your niche, it doesn't mean that your site should only be targeted to those phrases. Don't be afraid to build pages on your site to target relevant brand names and/or products in your niche, even if you can't find any search engine traffic for related phrases.

One of the easiest ways that you'll be able to find these phrases is by looking on Amazon for them because you won't want to focus on brands and/or products that you can't promote on Amazon. In fact, you may already have this research done from your previous Amazon research on your niche.

I actually already mentioned one of these phrases. Pinzon is a brand that wasn't provided to me in the Google ad group ideas, but I knew it was a brand that I would want to target because of the products I want to promote on Amazon through my site. I searched for it on Google Keyword Planner to see if there was search engine traffic for it and to try to pick a decent phrase to target, but I can do more extensive research on Amazon itself for their products.

Beyond the actual products and brands that you can find there, you may also be able to come up with keyword phrases and page ideas simply based on information in the product listings. Obviously the comforters have size options on Amazon, but some of these even have Style options, like one of the Pinzon comforters. Targeting these weight names, even as a secondary phrase on my product pages and/or informational pages on my site, could help to bring in targeted consumers.

Here are the Style Name options from one Pinzon comforter that uses “weight” names:

Another example that I was able to easily find in a Pinzon listing is the comparison chart in their vendor product description:

There are tons of great keywords here that I could reference in pages of my site or even as complete topics for pages. Pyrenees and PrimaLoft are two examples, but I could even go into vocabulary used in the chart itself - especially the left-hand column. Most of the items in the left-hand column were actually found in the Google ad group ideas too.

Again, just add any of these to your Notepad list. You can even search for them in the Keyword Planner to try to come up with some type of Google phrase to target for these topics, but it is quite alright if you cannot find relevant phrases because not all of your site pages need to target a specific phrase.

Question / Informational Pages

The other type of page I am looking to build is to target questions that potential consumers may have or other information that they may be interested in researching before they purchase my targeted products.

For the down comforter niche, some of these topics were addressed through keyword phrases that I was able to find, but other topics may only be found through customer reviews and/or customer Q&A on Amazon (or at least this is one good source to find these questions, as I had mentioned in the Amazon research lesson).

Here is the Customer Q&A from a Pinzon comforter (not always available with every product but often with the popular products):

First of all, these are great selling points for this product and potentially for the niche in general.

Make sure you take a look at all of the questions and answers available - there is a link at the bottom to view them all. Under each question, you may also see a link to additional answers, since more than one customer can provide an answer to each question.

There are also customer reviews that you can read through for most products. Not only can you figure out if products are worthwhile to promote or not, but you can also figure out excellent selling points for your products using the Amazon reviews.

Here is one review that I was able to easily find for a Pinzon comforter:

This particular review quickly points out a few great selling points - comforter warmth, softness, and filling evenness.

Here is a second review:

This identifies a number of great points - warmth again, thickness/fluffiness, weight/heaviness, down filling shifting and stitching, machine washing ability, and pricing.

It is important to remember to also take a look at negative reviews, if you can find them, in addition to the positive reviews. This helps to give you a better overall picture of the quality of a product, and it can also give you some excellent selling points that are major concerns of consumers for your niche.

Here's a negative review from the exact same product as the positive reviews I listed before:

This identifies a common flaw with down comforters and/or this one in particular. It basically says that the feathers leak out and seemingly straight through the fabric.

We can actually investigate this customer complaint more through the Comments link available here. I've shown that page below:

By taking a look at the comments, we can get more information to use for our content on this topic and also help to determine if the product is worth promoting or not.

As you can see, the first person basically believes that all down comforters will do this. The second persons says that LL Bean has ones that won't leak, although it also mentions that their Pinzon just leaks tiny feathers. This topic is definitely worth investigating more, but I would suspect that down leaking has something to do with the thread count and/or fill power. A higher thread count should produce a tighter weave, essentially squeezing tight the tiny holes that allows the down to escape over time.

I also want to be sure to address questions about washing and/or caring for down comforters.

Pyrenees was listed as the type of down fill for the Pinzon comforters on Amazon, so I have also included the potential for an informational phrase based on the fill type. I was able to find a related keyword phrase that looks to be related to a question about this topic.

After I have gone through all of these ad group ideas and their keyword phrases, here is my list that I have come up with - again this is not a final decision to build a page for all of these topics but merely research and a nice reference guide to use for myself throughout this site building process.

With just this information alone, you can already start to get a general picture of what the site will be about, and the best part is that Google did a lot of this research for me! You definitely don't want to solely rely upon their keyword phrases to plan your entire site, but this is a really easy way to get a jump-start and figure out what people are searching in your niche.