What do people type into the search engines when searching for your product or service?

The answer to that question is important to your online success. The words and phrases people use to search are called Keywords. This article will explain how to identify the keywords buyers use when searching for you.

This is part 3 of an article series on the Building Blocks of Search Engine Success. If you have not read the first two articles, you can read them on my blog at www.marknetgroup.com.

To recap, the building blocks of search engine success are:

1. Build a website that is search engine friendly. That means search engines can find your website and capture the content on your site.

2. Identify what search terms people will use to find your product or service and ultimately your website.

3. Identify reputable websites that can link to your website.

4. Analyze results and revisit the first three building blocks.

Keyword Selection

Keyword selection can be tedious, but done right can lead to buyers on your website. I want to stress the word buyer. Our goal is to grow your business; therefore, we want to focus on bringing you buyers. Some Internet Marketing companies will boast that they can increase your website traffic by 50%. My answer to them is “No Thanks”! I can easily increase any sites traffic by placing Angelina Jolie’s name throughout the website. I need to bring visitors that are looking for your product or service and are willing buyers.

Keeping the above in mind, let’s start finding your keywords.

1. List the keywords (words and phrases) you think people will when searching for your product or service. Be very specific. Words like “handbags” are too broad. Keywords like “custom leather handbags” are much better.

2. Go to http://www.wordtracker.com/trial.html and https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal to see how many people are searching for your keywords.

3. Revisit your list from your customer’s perspective as customers rarely use industry jargon. How do your customers search? Contact your existing customers and ask them, “If you had to search for me in Google what would you type into the search box?”

4. Take a test drive. Type your keywords into Google and see what comes up. Take at look at your competitors and how many results appear for each keyword. If you are competing with over a million sites it may be difficult to show up on the first page.

5. For the most important keywords, consider variations of the keyword - misspellings, plurals, and merged words. For example “highend handbags” vs. “high-end handbags”.

6. Narrow your list to 15 keywords. I like to start off with the most important keywords.  

Now that you have identified your keywords, it is time to place your keywords throughtout your website. I can probably write an entire books on keyword placement. But…I won’t instead I invite you to read next months article where I will teach you how to place your keywords throughout your website.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 11:58 pm and is filed under Internet Marketing. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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