Whittling down the key words

Here is where you are going to need a real strategy, and a good sense of your overall marketing plan. Even if you are working with a consultant, you need to have a hand in this process. You are the expert on your business, and in the end, only you know the real relevance of key words to your web site.

Click on this link to see a chart that Joe Shmo put together after looking up his key words in Overture, Yahoo’s Search Marketing Tool. Also, next to the keywords is the price that the top bidder paid to be number one on Yahoo. The price is not important, it is really just an indicator of how competitive each key word is.

The key words are listed by popularity.

What are we to make of these numbers? When choosing keywords, the objective is to strike a balance between key words that are the most relevant to your site and key words that will bring traffic. Remember, traffic in itself isn’t the goal. You want the right people to come to your site, the ones who will call you or buy from you.

In Joe Shmo’s case, he may be tempted by the most popular key word, Home Improvement. It is fairly competitive, but it does accurately describe what he does. However, home improvement is a pretty general term. It may be a web searcher who wants to retile their floor or someone who is looking for the HGTV network. He crosses this off the list.

Contractor is the most competitive, and it does describe Joe, but it is still a pretty general term. He rules it out.

Nurseries seems promising. It is not terribly competitive, and there are a lot searches. However, a nursery can also be a plant nursery, and for sure, a lot of those web users are looking for a place to buy plants.

House painter and house painting are both pretty competitive words, but they exactly describe Joe’s business. If coupled with geo targeting, it may be worth taking on the competition. After all, someone looking for House Painting, Boston, probably wants their house painted in Boston. He chooses these two keywords.

Another promising key word is Nursery Mural. It is not one of the most heavily searched terms. But, there is a good chance that a searcher looking for Nursery Murals wants their child’s room painted. Geo targeting is important here too.

Not surprisingly, no one is looking for Joe Shmo House Painting. However, you will want to add your company’s name to the list of key words. This is for the customer who knows your name, but not your web address.

Enough with the key words already

We are almost done with our list. Before we move onto the imperative task of refining your key words list, there are still a couple of places to look. Before you start any SEO project, you will want to make sure that you have a solid web tracking program. Your ISP should be able to provide you with site statistics, where the visitors came from, and what key words, if any, were placed in the search engines to find you. Obviously, this is valuable information. Also, if you have an internal search engine, you will want to know what search terms people are using. This gives you a good idea what users to your site are looking for.

There are a few commercial tools that can be really useful in expanding your list. They will also be important when you are whittling down your key words. The first is Yahoo’s Keyword Selector Tool. It is a free program. When you put in your keywords, it will create a list of related terms, and give you the frequency that the keywords were searched on last month:
Overture

Another really important tool is Wordtracker. Its costs a little bit of money, but it is well worth it in your keyword generating efforts.

You will also want to have discussions with people in your business, your employees and co-workers. Even people unrelated to your industry such as your spouse or neighbor might be able to provide you with a perspective (and some choice key words) that you wouldn’t have thought of.

And more keywords yet...

So far, our house painter has done a pretty good job. His brainstorming has covered all of the basics. He has also thought about updating his web site with new ideas that have come from his SEO activities. How else can he expand upon his list?

He can check out what the competition is doing. When you look at your competitors web sites, feel free to define “competitor” broadly. It can be another local shop just like yours, or it can be a national chain. The idea is to have an understanding about what key words people are using in your industry.

Joe Shmo decides to look up a local competitor’s web site. One way to see what keywords they are using is to look at the Title of the page. He sees that they are using “House Painting, Contractor, Massachusetts” in their tags. He hadn’t thought to mention that he was a contractor, so he puts that on his key word list.

Another way is to look at the meta tags in the source code. To do that in Explorer, go to the top navigational bar and click on View, then scroll down to Source. A notepad will open up with the web site’s source code. If you have never worked in HTML before, it may look a little confusing, but don’t be intimidated. Once you know your way around, it is easy to find what you want. First you will see the HTML tag and then a HEAD tag. Then there will be the TITLE tag. Under that is where the META tags are. Meta tags are one way a web site talks to search engines and to browsers. He sees this tag:
META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="House, Painting, wall paper, wallpapering, painter, painters, boston, massachusetts, ma , Home improvement"

Joe looks at the keywords. He doesn’t actually do wallpapering, so he ignores those. However, he sees the words “Home Improvement”. That is a pretty good keyword so he adds that to his list.

Here is his current key word list:

Home Improvement
Contractor
Nurseries
Nursery Murals
Aged Look Faux Finishes
House Painting
Boston
Specialty Finishes
Specialty Paint Finishes
Faux Painting
Interior Finishes
Textured Finishes
Joe Shmo House Painting
Joe Shmo
Shmo

More Keywords

When our house painter returns to his list, he may feel that he has done a pretty complete job. He has covered the basics, the fact that he does specialty painting, and he even made sure to include his location. But then he may think about his work a little bit more. The last couple of jobs he has done have been painting nurseries. He painted murals on the nursery walls, and he enjoyed it very much. Another recent job was creating a faux aged look in a dining room. When he thinks about it, nowhere on his web site are these specialties mentioned.

Its back to his list. He adds:

Nurseries
Nursery Murals
Aged Look Faux Finishes

And he makes a note to expand his web site to include examples these specialty finishes.
Here is an example of how SEO can update your entire marketing campaign. Tomorrow, we will have more ideas for Joe on how to expand his list.

Choosing Key Words

Whether you are hiring a consultant to optimize your site, or you are doing it yourself, you are going to want to be intimately involved in developing a keyword list. That is because nobody knows your business like you do.

Your keyword choices will drive the rest of the optimization process. There are many ways to develop a keyword list. The first thing you are going to want to do is brainstorm.
The answers to the questions above are a good place to start. Let us take the example of Joe Schmo House Painting. His business is in the Boston area and he specializes in specialty textured finishes. His initial brainstorming list may look something like this:

Keywords
House Painting
Boston
Specialty Finishes
Specialty Paint Finishes
Faux Painting
Interior Finishes
Textured Finishes
Joe Shmo House Painting
Joe Shmo
Shmo

In the next post, we will look at other avenues to expand this initial list.

SEO for small business

Its not just about clicks!

One of the first things clients usually ask me is about Google. Everyone wants to be number one on Google. That is only natural. More traffic to a web site is a real accomplishment. But a truly successful Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaign is about more than just traffic. After all, you can have thousands of people tromping through your web site, but if not one of them results in sale or a phone call, what does it matter?

A good SEO plan should help you think carefully about your web presence. What truly represents success to you? What exactly do you want the web user to do when on your site? Also, who is your target audience?

For example, you are a house painter based in the Boston area, and you are thinking about building a web presence. You want your company’s name, Joe Schmo House Painting, to appear when a searcher types in House Painting. But do you really? What if they web user lives in London? What if you have a pay per click campaign, and you just paid 5 cents for someone who lives thousands of miles away to click on your ad? What if this happens hundreds of times? That is money right out the window.

This is where key words come in, which we will explore in my next post. However, before we get to key words, it is imperative to answer some key questions. Who is your target audience? How are you going to measure success – is it more traffic to your site or is it more sales? The more defined the answer to these questions, the clearer and more successful your SEO campaign can be. For Joe Schmo House Painting, a goal of more phone calls to the 1-800 number that result in projects is a better goal then more traffic to the website. But an even better goal would be more phone calls to our 1-800 number that result in projects that utilize our specialty textured finishes. The more specific you can be, the easier it will be to identify and target your audience.

If you are a non-profit, success may be more intangible quality like more awareness of a particular problem. Maybe you are an animal rights activist, and you are concerned about puppy mills, and you would like to educate the public about them. This may be one situation where more site traffic is a reasonable goal. However, even in this case, more hits to your website is probably just one aspect of your organization’s goals. Your off-line goal may be something like passing legislation to ban puppy mills in your state. Keeping your organization’s goals in mind can help inform your SEO decisions, even if you are a non-profit.

The more clearly defined your goals are for the SEO, the better the outcome will be.