If you wanted to boil internet marketing down to a single starting point, keywords are it.
What is a Keyword?
A keyword is a word or phrase that a person enters into a search engine like Google and Bing or a social media site like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
Why Build a Keyword Strategy?
More and more consumers are finding businesses online through search engines. How do they find them? By using keywords! Fortunately, you can take advantage of this consumer habit by optimizing your website around the keywords that are relevant to your business and which keywords consumers are using to find you online. This will increase your chances of getting found by people searching with those keywords, which will drive more and better quality traffic to your business’ website.
While it’s difficult to know exactly which keywords will get the most relevant people to find your business, there are ways to determine the popularity and competitiveness of certain keywords. You can also test and analyze how effective different keywords are in drawing visitors to your site.
As a business professional, you should make sure the right people are finding your business online. In this section, you will learn how to define which keywords will maximize your potential to draw in relevant traffic from search engines.
Keyword research is an ongoing process that should be followed closely. It gives valuable insight in terms of industry trends and product demand. Comprehensive keyword research can help a business grow its organic traffic and save you from spending money on pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns such as Google AdWords.
How to Create a Keyword Strategy
1. Create a list of 3-5 keywords relevant to your business. Think like you’re using the brain of someone searching for your product with a search engine. For small- and medium-sized businesses, your keywords are not your brand name. Instead, think of words and short phrases that get to the core of what your product or service is about.
2. Choose keywords based on difficulty and relevance. The keywords you choose should be based on difficulty and relevance. Some very general words such as “marketing” or “business” are very competitive, making it harder to rank well for them in search engine results. If you are a small- or medium-sized business, you probably want to choose less competitive keywords, more specifically related to your business (these are commonly referred to as long tail keywords). The greater the volume of searches on a keyword, the more competitive it is. There are a number of different tools you can use to determine the competitiveness of a specific keyword as well as suggest and help you brainstorm new keyword ideas. These tools include the Google Keyword Tool or HubSpot’s Suggest Keywords feature in its software’s Keyword Grader Tool.
Another important factor for picking keywords is their relevance to your business. While some obscure terms might be easy to rank for, they might not be relevant to your business. You should find a balance between relevance and difficulty. Choose about 5 keywords that match your business well. Note that these keywords do not have to be perfect at first. You can try out different ones to see which work best for you.
3. Design and optimize your website around your keywords.
Matt Anderson is a business problem solver, Inbound Marketing Consultant, and writer for Mojo Media Labs, bringing readers the latest in digital marketing news, tips, and life hacks for achieving ridiculous online growth. Follow @MojoMediaLabs.
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Matt,
I’m a big believer in starting with the easiest and working up to the keywords that you’d like to rank for.
It’s really hard these days to rank for anything without a lot of work, especially so for high competition keywords. With the recent algorithm roll-outs it’s all become a bit harder, and a lot more manual, so it’s important to know if your manual efforts likely to get the traction they need.
I lean strongly towards PPC these days, where keyword selection is still important, but the turnaround time to find out if you got something wrong is so much less. It’s such a great proving ground.
Nice little post – and so important to start off on the right foot with the right keywords. Great advice.
Rick.
Keyword is the most important. so Finding the right keywords can help a lot.
As a beginner, i want to make my blog as well as commercial site visible. Just for visibility, should i use a long keyword or brand name only is effective.
In my thought if i focus in brand name initially to gain traffic and visibility and after that i focus on specific keyword, that might be effective….. Isn’t it so?
We would actually recommend the opposite–focus on long tail keywords, and do not try to brand. We might write a blog on this soon to expand on the issue, and I’ll let you know if we do, but here is the reasoning:
(Edit: Some of the following points do not fully apply if you are a local business dealing with local competitors. This whole process is much smaller scale when competing within a neighborhood or city rather than competing nationally or internationally.)
If you are a new business, or a small business, very few people will be looking for your brand, but many people will be looking for your services. Imagine if Microsoft were to be started today–nobody would be searching for “Microsoft Windows,” but many people would be looking for “computer operating system,” or “Apple OS alternative.” Ranking for keywords relevant to your industry is much more important than establishing brand identity, brand identity is for large companies and industry leaders, that’s when you get into advertising. Using Mojo as an example, few people look for “Mojo Media Labs” in a search engine, but many people visit here looking for an “effective keyword strategy” or “online marketing blog,” and as we become more well known, our brand recognition is growing naturally because more people are beginning to recognize our articles.
So, in terms of order:
1. Focus on very specific long tail keywords (3-4 words) related to your industry that have a good amount of search volume but low competitive difficulty, meaning not many people are addressing these keywords specifically. They’re easy to rank for and will get you noticed immediately. For your recent blog, “How To Do SEO of A Site,” many people are talking about SEO and your content will likely not be found in search. But if you called it “How To Do Geo-targeted SEO for a B2B Site,” the conversation around those keywords (geo-targeted SEO for a B2B) would be much smaller and you can appear in search results much easier. Try to discover a niche or void in the conversation you can fill.
2. Once you rank for a lot of specific keywords and your business has grown quite a bit, begin trying to rank for more competitive keywords, 1-2 words long. That is when you can approach trying to rank for “SEO Marketing” or “SEO Services” in general instead of “Nepal SEO Services.” But it takes a long time to get to this point.
3. Once you have grown substantially and are a recognized leader in your market, or you are at the point where searchers are directly comparing you to your competitors, now is the time for branding. Should I choose Microsoft vs. Apple? For consumers, this is largely a branding issue. But if your market is local, it still applies–it all depends on what market you want to dominate. If it’s just a neighborhood or city, you can begin branding much earlier. If searchers in your area are wondering if they should eat at “Joe’s Pizza” or “Bob’s Pizza,” you begin trying to establish your brand.
Hey thanks matt…..great article….really it altered my concept totally!! well i or lets say we are just a small business which have not even started completely…..we still have some designing left on our own websites…..also there is almost no post in the blog….i first wanted to research on doing SEO and marketing our company to make it visible….so i guess this research is proving very helpful for me….
Thanks again