Keywords – Are You Choosing the Right Ones?

To get enough potential customers to your website you need to harness the power of search engines. Targeted customers are potential customers because they come to your site looking for something specific through the keywords that you have used, either in your web content or your pay per click campaign.

As you plan your keyword strategy remember that using the right keywords, ones that people actually use, is the name of the game. Your potential customers are those visitors who are interested in what you have to say as long as it is relevant to their search.

Back and the old days before people got really search engine savvy, a one word search term was common: insurance, mortgage, diet – you get the idea. Try getting the first place position in the Google with a one word phrase like those now – it’s a much steeper hill to climb, and an expensive one at that.

With most people these days using a three or four word search terms when using a search engine we can really see how specific and targeted searches are. So, for example, if you have a diet website you know there is a lot of competition out there – I just googled diet and there are 187,000,000 results – that’s a lot of competition.

How easy do you think it is to get a number one placement for the term ‘diet?’ Do you think you would have more success ranking number one for a slightly longer search term, such as ‘diet scams.’ You bet ya – ‘diet scams’ has only 4,480,000 listings. And what about ‘diet scams revealed,’ a three word search term that has only 65,300 listings! Do you think you could optimize your page to be number one out of just 65K or so? Sure you can!

Now that you can see the power of funneling down and using longer search terms as your keyword phrase it’s time to work out a strategy to evaluate your website’s keywords and phrases.

The first step is working out what your keywords and phrases are. This is actually sometimes more difficult than it sounds because most business owners think they know what those keywords and phrases are, but after a little research find out that they did not.

It’s very difficult to be objective when you are so close to your business or endeavor and put yourself in your customers’ shoes. What you would use for a search term is likely to be an industry term not one used by regular Joes on the street.

You will likely be surprised by what you find when you ask your customers what they see your business is about and how they understand it, as well as how they would go about searching for it on the Internet.

When you have a stack of keywords or phrases from your customers and you feel like the big picture is getting clearer for you then think about adding in your own keywords – but remember, if you are trying to gain new customers or clients, industry specific terms are not going to bring you conversions.

With your keyword list now you have to work out how relevant you think the terms are. If you are a web hosting company and your polled customers tell you ‘free web hosting’ is a search term they would use you should still think twice about whether it really is a search term for your business. Do you want to offer free web hosting? If not then do not entertain the thought – scrap that keyword phrase. By using it the only people you will bring to your site are those looking for free web hosting. Will they suddenly be looking for hosting they have to pay for when they land on your snazzy website? In a word: No.

You want to use keywords and phrases that people actually use to find things on the Net so choose popular words and terms. If no one searches for a term why use it, just in the unlikely event that someone, some day might?

How can you find out how popular terms are? There are lots of resources available that can give you this information if you want to find this out for yourself. A popular one is Wordtracker. [Full disclosure – that is my affiliate link to the site where you can sign up for a free trial.]

But popularity alone is not a certainty for bringing in web traffic. Your keywords and phrases need to be specific and relevant – remember ‘diet scams revealed?’ That term was not the most popular [that was diet] but if you have a website where you debunk diets then you are going to get traffic from that term.

And finally as you go through your list of keywords remember the why of it all – why is someone typing in those specific words in a search engine in the first place? Maybe if they typed in ‘diet scams revealed’ they have been thinking about a diet but want to know if it is really unhealthy, or dangerous in some way.

When you think you can locate the whys then you will have a fuller grasp of your visitors’ motivations and you can expand upon them. You may be able to offer more products or services once you have successfully pinned down specific customer motivations, which is a nice bonus.

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