Online Success Series Part Two: How Important Are Keywords?
Check out the first post in this series here.
Now that you’ve chosen a market to target through your intensive niche research, you’ll want to do three things to make sure your business actually connects with your market:
(Ready?)
Snag your ideal customer from the search engines…
Make it clear that you know exactly what they’re looking for, and why they’re looking for it…
… and let them know that you can easily provide the solution to their problems and concerns at your site!
Which is why NO sales website is complete without keywords.
Keywords act as roadmaps for your potential customers from search engines like Google and Yahoo — pointing them where they need to go to get exactly what they need!
If you’re not using keywords on your sales website, there’s a good chance that the people who could use your products aren’t going to find you. We already talked about using Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery to discover and narrow down your niche — now let’s use them to drill down into keyword research.
So when it comes to finding the right keywords for your website, there are a few key questions to ask yourself:
- How many different terms can be used to describe the products I had to sell? Are there slang terms people use to speak of your products if they’re “in the know”? Abbreviations for product names that are specific to your industry?
- Are people searching specifically by product name, or by product type… or both? Are they searching for specific brands, or just using more general search terms that could apply to a number of different products? Either way, it’s easy to include both types of terms in your copy and product descriptions… even your navigation!
- What types of problems are people looking to solve with products like mine? Try searching on different problem statements, or using problem-solving words in the keywords you search on.
You know your products best, and you want to be the person who best knows your customer. That’s why we recommend that all our clients walk through the keyword discovery process as a primary step in setting up any sales website.
As we mentioned already, there are a number of tools on the Web that are useful for discovering the keywords that you need to put to work on your pages, including Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker, and even the Google AdWords Keyword Tool.
Each tool offers a slightly different perspective on keyword quality, so it’s good to use them to check results against one another. You’ll want to find keywords that rate as well as possible across all the different applications.
Finally, remember that your goal is to find keywords that:
- People are actually using to search
- Enough people are using to search (and there don’t had to be thousands of searches a day to make the keyword worthwhile!)
- Directly relate to the products you sell, so the traffic you generate doesn’t end up frustrated
- had minimal competition (as in, few sites like your own that show up in results)
Once you’ve chosen them, your best keywords will now become a big part of your site. You’ll use them in your HTML code, your salescopy, and your product descriptions… all the way through to the rest of your site content and even any advertising you buy.
A quick note: you’ll want to fire up these keyword search programs every few months to make sure your keywords are still performing for you. Keyword value can change pretty quickly, according to changes in season, news events, trends or any number of other factors — and that’s information you should be on top of!
Stay tuned for Part Three: Is Your Website Primed for Conversions?
