Find Best Keywords
Find Best Keywords
Many times, when a small business owner begins the process of promoting a website with no prior experience in doing so, information about what keywords to use for attracting the right kind of traffic can be tough to find.
Best keywords for your site? I always start with the most generic phrases, maybe one to two words max, and start pulling the big fish site who rank organically for the top 10-20 spots on Google.
Pull out a spreadsheet and organize results…..then examine the HTML source for each home page (or page in your ranking results for each site). By looking at the ‘meta’ tags, both keywords and description tags, you’ll easily begin to form a common base of phrases with which to work with.
Notice that I did say ‘work with’ for now as it’s not necessarily THESE words and phrases you want to use! These initial phrases are generally too competitive for a small site just getting started with organic promotion. You are still simply trying to get ideas, but this is an easy way to brain storm your way into finding the right targets.
How do we get ideas? We have to put some ‘research’ time in before we do anything further. Make a list of those phrases, then head to Google research tools and start to whip up a list that should grow wildly before you have selected your final list.
Let’s say for instance, that your small business makes unique, one of a kind fruit baskets. Let’s also say that you’re beginning to build your web site with the assumption that people will look for you on Google by typing the words ‘fruit basket’ or ‘fruit baskets’. You proceed to optimize your pages for ‘fruit basket’ as common sense would dictate.
Again, look at Google’s free keyword research tool and get ready to ’spreadsheet’ before you type the first title tag on your site or optimize any copy.
The Fruit Basket Company (no, the UNIQUE Fruit Basket Company!)
Find Best Keywords
Looking at Google’s numbers, we can see that, yes, there were number of searches for ‘fruit basket’ and ‘fruit baskets’ last month….in the 60-70 THOUSAND range actually…..for the month!
So, why wouldn’t we focus on this phrase? It’s still way too generic! In other words, we might be ‘well optimized’ for this phrase, but so are a lot of other larger, older (important to Google) sites that have LOTS of links pointing to them….you won’t be in the playing field for this generic keyword anytime soon!
What do do? Well, scroll to the bottom of the list…..just before we cross into the ‘not enough data’ results. I notice that there are about 140 searches for the phrase ‘unique fruit baskets’ last month, which is what we specialize in anyway! There were also about 110 searches for ‘fruit and gourmet baskets’ last month…..if you company does these, you are in luck!
If you build and optimize two pages for your baskets instead of one, you might get top 30 rankings for BOTH of these phrases….a total of 250 searches last month that you might be in the top results for in the next few months. I’d rather have 10 pages that have top rankings for 10 different niche phrases appropriate to my business, than ONE product page that is NOT found for the most competitive phrase on the planet, absolutely!