Imagine If you built a house without foundations, it would crumble into the dirt and you'd have to start over. Keyword research is the foundation you build your online business around.
Don't worry if you've already built your website without doing this first, most of the small businesses we help are in this situation. But if you're in the lucky position of not having started yet, this information will save you a great deal of money, time and frustration.
What keywords are and why they're so important
Keywords are words and phrases we type into the search engines to find 'stuff', it's really as simple as this. So if you can show up at the search engines for the keywords relating to your business you can make a lot of money and build a tremendous amount of consistent traffic.
Keywords are basically split into two camps:
- Highly competitive 1 and 2 word phases like 'gardening' and 'garden supplies' which are called short tail keywords
- Less competitive longer phases like 'kitchen garden supplies' and 'gardening centres in suffolk' called long tail keywords
Usually the longer the phrase the more targeted the searcher and therefore the easier to convert. The shorter the phrase the more search volume but also the more competition. Click the images for full view below.
As you can see in the Long Tail example above for 'gardening centres in suffolk' there are 467,000 competing pages in Google's index. But in the Short Tail example for 'gardening' Google has over 43 MILLION competing pages.
So to rank on the first page of Google for either keyword, you've got to convince Google your page is one of the top 10 best results to show a searcher.
Are you beginning to realise it's not as simple as slapping up a few web pages and waiting for the rush?
- Also notice with the keyword that mentions a place, in this case Suffolk, Google also shows a map with some Local results. This is another way to appear for regional results and absolutely free right now. Take a look at our Google local listings and promotions page for more details.
How to find keywords for your business
Finding words and phrases is a never ending process, I'm always on the lookout for words people use to describe my business I've not considered before. There are hundreds of ways to go about this - Speaking to clients, looking at your competitors' text and wordings, doing a brain dump with a pencil and paper, etc. These are things you should be on the lookout for all the time.
But above all of these there are tools you can use which not only give you the related words to your business, but also the number of times each word and phrase has been used at the search engines.
- it's a bit like walking down the street and every person who's interested in your 'stuff' has a big red arrow pointing at them...How easy would that make finding high quality prospects?
Again, for the professional optimisers out there are tools like Wordtracker and KeywordDiscovery, both paid products, which will be used in conjunction with
Googles' free keyword research tool.
But the Google tool is so powerful you'll need to be doing some pretty serious number crunching to need the paid tools.
Below are two screenshots taken from the Google Keyword Tool
You'll notice I've chosen 'gardening' as the keyword to research. In the first screenshot is the default result you will get back from Google, showing you all the keywords and the amount of times each one has been searched the previous month in Google.
In the second screenshot, I've chosen to show more information regarding the keywords:
- How much you'd likely pay in positions 1-3 if you're using Google Adwords to drive traffic
- What the keyword trends are for the particular keywords
To choose more options just select them from the drop down box just above the number 2 in the second screenshot.
What can you expect if you start to build targeted pages on your web site with keywords used at the search engines?
Below are three screenshots taken from the statistics package we use to track traffic to clients' sites. All three are from the same month so you know we're not just picking our best results. They show the number of visitors to each client site, (names removed for privacy purposes), and the proportion of the visitors sent free from the search engines.
Key:
- Blue line is total number of visitors to each site
- Yellow line is the number of visitors sent from the search engines after they typed in a keyword/phrase
You'll notice all of the sites would only have a tiny trickle of visitors if it wasn't for the fact each site is being found at the search engines when people type in their keywords.
The other point to notice is the consistency of the traffic. Once you get high rankings the traffic just keeps coming month after month.
Get your keyword research and website blueprint
To make sure your website is set up for words and phrases people use on a daily basis at the search engines, let us build you a professional keyword list which will also act as your web site blueprint.
For more information please contact us on 01394 286263
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