subject: 4 Simple Tips To Finding The Right Keywords [print this page] How exactly do you determine whether a keyword is right for your website? Use the wrong keyword and you may increase your traffic but not necessarily your business. Since the goal should be to attract people that are ready, willing and able to do business with us, we need to focus on keywords that draw qualified traffic to our website. This is where your keyword research comes into play.
The first step is to make a list of as many keywords as you can. There are several different ways to come up with keywords, and these are the four that we are going to focus on:
* Figure them out on your own
* Ask existing clients or colleagues what they might search to find you
* Research what your competition is using
* Use a keyword suggestion tool
Figure them out on your own
This can seem like an easy one, but it is not. Beyond the obvious few, it can be difficult to come up with good keywords because many times you are too close to the problem. You know the ins and outs of your business and tend to think of phrases that perhaps someone well educated in what you do might search. The challenge is that in most cases your ideal client is someone that may not be as educated in your business as you are and chances are they are not going to search the same terms that you might.
The trick is to put yourself in the shoes of your ideal client and truly understand how they search. Someone who woke up to a broken water heater and now has 6 inches of water on the floor is going to search for a plumber differently than someone thinking about remodeling the spare bathroom. Once you understand the challenges that your potential clients have and how your company solves them, you are well on your way to coming up with some stronger keyword phrases!
Ask existing clients or colleagues what they might search to find you
What better way to put yourself in the heads of your clients than to actually ask them. By reaching out to your existing clients you can learn firsthand what they are searching for and add these terms to your list. The best way to accomplish this is to send out a quick 10 question survey to all of your clients. Chances are a smaller percentage of say about 25% will fill it out, but the information that they send you is priceless!
Dont waste any of those 10 questions. There are several things that you can accomplish with this survey aside from gathering keyword ideas. You can ask them what you need to do to improve your company, what services they would like to see you add, give them an opportunity to leave you a testimonial, what search engine they generally use and of course if they were doing a search using their favorite search engine, what words would they use to find you. All of this information can be priceless in terms of helping to grow your business, so dont underestimate your clients!!!!
Research what your competition is using
If you dont already know who your primary competitors are, then you have some work to do, but most people in business have a good idea of who their competition is. If you dont have any direct competition then you should have an idea of other people or companies within your industry that you admire and would like to model yourself after. Once you have found these websites follow these steps to find out what keywords they are using:
* Go to their website
* Right click over the text of the page
* Choose View Source from the menu
* Search the top of the document for:
This is where you will find the keyword meta tag. In it will be a list of all of the keyword that they are optimizing either that page or their entire website for. Not all websites will end up using this tag, so dont scratch your head for too long if you cant find it on one of your competitors websites. Just move on to the next site. Look through all of these keywords and add the ones that you like onto your list.
Use a keyword suggestion tool
The way that a keyword suggestion tool works is you input one or more keywords in and it will in turn suggest other keywords to consider. It may suggest a few more or hundreds more. It depends on the tool and what word or words you initially input. Once you put in your words look through the results and add any keywords that come up that you like and need to add to your list. Once you are done, you can even add those new keywords to the keyword suggestion tool and see if it comes up with anything new.
There are several keyword tools out there that you can use, but I would suggest you start by using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Its good, it works well, its easy to use and its cheapfree.
Conclusion
Once you are done with these four methods you should have a fairly comprehensive list of anywhere from 30-300 keywords depending on your subject matter and how extensive you went through this exercise. In the next article well talk about what to do with these keywords now that you have them!
