Your Keyword Research Is Critical

I’ve had many enquires on how to do a web page and get it listed on the search engines. Many people get a web designer to do up a nice looking website about their company and expect their website to be listed on the search engine. After some time, they can’t find their website when they search for it, except when they search for their company’s name. What happened? Why can’t I find my website?

This is a common thing that people do when they start internet marketing. After the website is up and they have paid for the website, they don’t get the results they want. Then they keep wondering what went wrong.

The problem lies with the keywords that the person uses. In most cases, web designers will ask the person what does the person want. That person will most probably say that they want to advertise the company or firm, or the person is in this or that business.

So the website is designed with the company’s name or the industry name or the nature of the business as the primary keywords.

Photo by notsogoodphotography

But have you ask yourself whether do people search for your company’s name or industry or nature of the business on the web? Keywords are words that search engines use to index and rank your webpages. An example is, if your website is done up with keyword, Company A Ltd. the seach engine will index your webpages as Company A Ltd. So whenever someone searches for Company A Ltd., your website will be listed. Now, if search engine like Google indexed your webpage as Company A Ltd, it won’t appear if people search for your product lets say “Graphite Fishing Rods For Children”.

This is because you didn’t use “Graphite Fishing Rods For Children” as your keyword. So it is really simple. Use keywords that your customer will search in the search engine to find your product or services.

So how do I research for keywords relevant to my internet business or offline business?

You have to start with marketing 101…that is doing a SWOT analysis. SWOT analysis is an analytical method that you use to assess your Strengths, your Weaknesses, your opportunities and Threats. In other words, you need to have a good idea of what you can do and what you can’t do. Then you need to analyse your market whether it is a lucrative market or not. Finally you need to analyse your competitors.

Assessing your strengths and weaknesses is pretty straight forward. Sell what you are really good at doing and don’t do something that you are not so good at. The point here is to be focused on either one product or service first. Don’t try to be like amazon offering thousand and one products and services and lose your focus.

Analyse your online opportunities by doing keyword research. Use Google to search for your product or service that you intend to sell.You should also use keyword search tools such as Google’s Keyword Tool and Free Wordtracker.

Generally, if there are lots of searches made and many pages in the search engine result page (serp), then it may indicate that there is a big market in that particular niche. Try to find keywords that are relevant to your product or service offering that have a balance of not too big or too small niche. To big and you have to fight really hard to get ranked on 1st page of the serp. Too small and you won’t get much traffic.

Read up all your competitor’s webpages and see what are they doing. The general indication is more competitors mean bigger market. See what your competitors are doing and imitate them. Do what all the top ranking competitors are doing but don’t copy their materials. You can get ideas from them but since you are really good at what you are doing, producing your own materials is not difficult.

Brainstorm as many keywords as you can and run each keyword through the SWOT analysis to shortlist your keywords. Remember, getting the right combination of tightly related keywords in a well balanced niche market means getting good targeted traffic with minimum or medium competition. So spend most of your time looking for good keywords. I have met internet marketers who can spend up to a few weeks to search for their keywords.

Photo by Jacob Bøtter

Finding the right keywords solve almost half your problem of getting the right traffic. The design of the webpage is the least of your worries. So emphasize on your keyword research and you will strike your own goldmine.

Once you have your keywords, you can give it to your web designer and tell them you want to have a website designed with your list of keywords. For more tips on search engine optimisation, you can go to my previous articles listed the in SEO Tips category.

Give your web designer the guidelines on what to put and what not to put in your webpages and they’ll design something nice for you which is probably search engine optimised. You can find from my earlier articles under the category SEO Tips on what are the guidelines that you or the web designer can do.

You should also tell your designer how to use your keywords in the meta tags, title page and content. My earlier SEO articles touched on this.

Finally, track and monitor your webpages and see how it is doing. If you have done it correctly, then you should be moving up the ranks in your niche.

Search Engine Optimisation is a whole topic that its best you learn something about it. Armed with good basics, you can tweak and optimise your own webpages to help it move up the serp’s ranking.

Don’t depend on your web designer. They may not know much about search engine optimisation. Remember, ranking on 1st page of your niche give you free targeted traffic to your website. Traffic means potential customers!

You can learn some of the basics first, and its good enough for you to dominate long tail niches and make some money. Once you get a hang of it, you can learn advanced SEO techniques which will give you skills to fight with the big boys and that is where big money lies.