So you have a website and you want to find out what potential customers are typing on Google when they’re looking for your product or service.
If you don’t know what they’re searching for , you can’t structure your site’s content to match their searches.
You hear me talk about Google alot and for good reason. They’re the biggest search engine in the world and they know alot about your potential customers: their likes, their dislikes, their shopping habits, and yes they also know their searching habits.
And Google is more than willing to give you that information for FREE.
So where do you go to find this stuff out?
Go to Google and type “keyword tool” and click on first listing or go to this link http://tinyurl.com/qkfuh
This page will give you alot of information about any search term you’re targetting. For instance it will tell you that
Lynchburg web design is getting 250 broad searches and 91 exact searches (always choose exact search vs broad search for more accurate estimates).
How to select the best search terms for your business.
Once you get to this page type in a particular search term you’re interested in. Hint: the broader the term the more traffic it will have but it will also have the most amount of competition, making it harder to rank for.
Plus.. a broad term may not help you anyway, especially if your customers are local or regional.
Local or Regional Searches
Ex: If you’re a local photographer you might want to target something like “photographers in lynchburg va” vs “photographers”. The reason for this is because with the first term you know they’re looking for someone in lynchburg. The second term doesn’t tell you anything about their location. Therefore, even if your website were number one for the term “photographer”, it wouldn’t help you much, unless you can travel to any part of the world.
National or World Wide Searches
If you offer a product or service that can be purchased by anyone in the country or world there are still ways to narrow the search to eliminate alot of the competition.
Ex. Say you have a business where you offer web design service like we do i’ll probably be seen by about 4,400 potential customers. If i target that search term i’ll also be competing with about 281,000,000 other websites, which makes it next to impossible to get listed on front page of Google. So I may consider narrowing it a bit to something more specific like virginia web design since we are located in Lynchburg Va.
That term gets about 720 exact searches each month and has about 221,000,000 sites competing for that term.
Yes that is still a very high number but given my website’s hign Page Rank (Google’s view of my site’s popularity on the web) which is 4 out of 10, I stand a good chance to compete with those millions of sites. Check you’re site’s rank here: http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php
If you don’t have a high page rank you’ll want to aim for search terms with less competition. How much less you ask?
Its hard to tell exactly without knowing where your site is currently but you can start targetting terms closer to the 30o,ooo to 1,000,000 range. Do some trial and error and you’ll get better as you do this more often. Number of competing sites are located on top right of google when you do a search.
Hopefully that’s a good explanation on how to select good search terms.
What do you do after you find out what terms you want to target
1: Create pages on your website that mention those specific terms. Hint: Try to focus the content of the page around that term. Dont mention too many terms as it will make them less effective and don’t over mention the term either. Avoid too much redundancy as google will treat it as keyword stuffing.
2: Make sure the title of the page has the term in it. Title is the text that appears on top left of the browser not what appears on the menu.
3: If you have a blog make a post using that keyword. If you don’t have a blog read my 5 reasons to have a blog.
If you’ve learned anything from this article I hope it’s the fact that you now have a powerful tool that will allow you to know how to reach your customers better.
Stay tuned as I will soon make a video tutorial where I’ll show you these steps so you see how it’s done.
Tell us your thoughts by leaving a comment so I can make my articles better next time. Thank you.
