You’re writing a page about a new stadium in your City, soon to enjoy the sounds of crowds in the bleachers watching duels between batters and pitchers, hoping to watch balls batted over the center field fence, or shutouts pitched, or the perfect double play.
Your page could simply contain a picture, a street address, and maybe a schedule of games to be played for the season. Or it could include a skeletal list of links to simple pages about the team that will play there, an image of sections where tickets could be purchased, a page to purchase those tickets, and another page about parking and directions.
There’s nothing wrong with delivering just the facts and providing simple information that fills needs.
But let’s imagine that your goal for the site is to make it more likely that people sign up for season ticket plans, that they get excited about attending games, that they consider driving for a few hours to see the stadium in person rather than kicking back and watching on TV. You want people excited about the new stadium, and you want to show and tell them what’s new. And you want to draw on the history of the players and team to draw old fans and interest new ones.
You want your site to engage and persuade and excite, and be found by as many people as possible.
So you decide to create pages filled with pictures, and descriptions, and quotes, and nostalgia and forecasts for the future.
What’s new at the playing field? What’s hidden under the bleachers? What were the buildings like that this team played in the past?
When you write for the audience of a web site, one of the most important steps along the way is keyword research, and exploring the words and phrases that your audience might expect to see on the pages of your site, and that they might search for to find your pages. Keyword research can help you develop ideas and concepts that you want to include on your pages, building an information architecture of your site. It can assist you in identifying the different audiences for your site, and the different informational tasks that they might be able to satisfy on your pages.
KNowing Audiences and Tasks for Keyword Research
Many articles on keyword research often seem to start with a description of keyword tools that can be found online, and the idea of plugging words into those tools and seeing what they recommend. While that can be helpful, there are steps you should consider taking before ever getting to that stage. One of the most important is to think carefully about the audiences that your site is written for because those are the people who you want to find your pages.
For a page, or pages about a new baseball stadium and the team that plays there, your objectives may be to inform the public about the playing field, satisfy the stadium owners and users with what you write, encourage people to attend games, attract and inform baseball fans and corporate stadium box holders and media coverage, find employees and interns and volunteers, and other possible people who might be interested in the stadium.
For each of the audience members, you can include information on the site appropriate to them.
For instance, from a keyword research perspective, people attending a game may want to know such things as:
- Seating options
- Game schedules
- Ticket prices
- Parking locations
- Driving Directions
- Mass Transit availability
- Information about the area around the stadium, such as where nearby hotels are located
- What kind of food and drink might be available, and where concession stands and restaurants are located
- Differences between the old stadium and the new one
- Security policies (can you bring video cameras into the game, or laptops, or snacks?)
- Accessibility and services for people with disabilities
- The availability of team memorabilia and merchandise
- Game rosters, players stats, win-loss records, league standings
Before the thought of collecting keywords for your pages and looking them up in keyword tools ever enters your head, you need to consider the objectives behind the site and the informational needs of the audiences those objectives address.
Concepts before Keyword Research
Once you have an idea of what kinds of information that you want your site to contain, and you have a sense of the organization of your pages, it can help to start thinking about and collecting keywords. It can be a little dangerous to focus too much upon specific keywords at this stage, because doing so may end up limiting your options. Instead, take some of the tasks for your audiences above, and start thinking about concepts related to those tasks.
For instance, when you’re considering seating options, there are many possible ways to describe those.
Some may have to do with prices, with comfort, with convenience, with sight-lines or location in the stadium.
By considering concepts related to the keywords that you might use, you are coming up with categories that your keywords might fit within that make it easier to expand the choice of possible keywords that you might decide to use. As you come up with these categories, you may think of some keywords that you would like to research. It doesn’t hurt to include them within your categories at this point, but the focus should be upon expanding the possible range of categories first.
Expanding Keywords with -Onyms
Expanding your choice of keywords, and understanding the risks of some keyword choices can also be very helpful. I mention -Onyms in the title to this post because there are several kinds of words, usually ending in “onym” that can make keyword research more interesting, and more rewarding.
The suffix -onym in English means “name” or “word,” and you’ll find it at the end of many words that describe other words. If you write for the web, one that you may often consider when writing is the word “synonym.”
And knowing about some of these types of -onyms can help you from being misled by keyword research tools that might show attractive search volumes that are misleading.
Some -Onyms to think about while doing keyword research:
Antonyms Words that have opposite meanings. When someone is buying, someone else must be selling. When someone is pitching, someone else is hitting. Can the opposites of some of your keywords lead to useful concepts and keywords?
Acronyms As well as abbreviations and capitalisms, these shortened versions of words and phrases are common in many areas of life, from the names of organizations to types of measurements and more. Baseball, for instance, is filled with them, from MLB for Major League Baseball to baseball statistics such as rbi, era, oba, hbp (runs batted in, earned run average, on base percentage, hit by pitch), and many more.
Heteronyms – These words are spelled identically but pronounced differently. While you should lead a horse to water, the lead in pencils is something else entirely.
Homonyms – Words that share the same spelling and pronunciation but which have different meanings. So, you may deposit your money in a bank, but you shouldn’t just leave it on laying on the grass along the bank of a river.
Capitonyms – A word that changes meaning and possibly pronunciation when capitalized. For example, If you polish, you might be shining your shoes or your silver, and if you’re Polish you may be from Poland.
With heteronyms, homonyms, and capitonyms, the search volumes on your keyword research may refer to the meaning of the word you’re thinking about as well as completely different meanings. If you’re considering selling shoes from Poland, and look up the search volume on Google’s keywords tool for the phrase “Polish shoes,” it might tell you that there are an average of 74,000 searches a month for “shoe polish.” That’s not very helpful.
Holonym – A word for a whole of which other words are part. For instance, a baseball stadium contains a pitcher’s mound, bleachers, an infield, an outfield, home plate, dugouts.
Troponym – A verb that indicates a more precise manner of doing something with the replacement of more general verb with a more specific one. Instead of walking to first base, a runner may hustle, trot, or crawl, for example.
Hyponym – A word that indicates some kind of subclass. So, instead of baseball players, you can have pitchers, catchers, third-basemen, infielders, outfielders, designated hitters, relief pitchers.
Hypernym – The opposite of a hyponym. Instead of a pitcher, you have a New York Yankee, or a baseball player, or a major-leaguer, or an athlete.
Eponym – When the name of a real or fictitious person is used to name something else such as a particular place, or an invention, or a group of people, or some other item. The House that Ruth built was often used to refer to the old Yankee Stadium, for example. Tommy John surgery is a kind of surgery pitchers sometimes undergo, named after Tommy John.
Demonym – A name given to people referring to the place they are from, such Virginians, or New Yorkers, or Northerners or Americans.
Toponym – A name that has been taken from a place or geographic features, such as Kentucky Fried Chicken or Chicago deep-dish pizza or Great Falls Spring Water.
Exploring different -onyms may help you expand the keywords and concepts that you are researching. Some of them may help come up with brand names and business names. Some are good to be aware of when words or phrases might have more than one meaning, even if they are spelled the same.
Keeping -onyms in mind while you create pages can be very useful, as well as fun.