Top Website Tips > Web Marketing > Keywords choose them wisely

Keywords, choose them Wisely

By Dwayne Goerges

By now you have likely heard that keywords are extremely important in having search engines display your web site. So how do you choose them? Guess? Ask a friend? Check successful competitors sites? There is a better way! Googles Adwords Keyword tool.

First let’s digress. There are a lot of things that affect your ranking in search engines and ultimately how many sales you make from you web site. The quality and amount of content on your web site, how many links point to your web site, what keywords are used, how they are used, even the age of your site can play a factor. Large companies spend thousands of dollars on getting their companies to the top of the rankings and keeping them there. If you’re a small company trying to compete with these large budgets, you are likely to come up short.

Niche Marketing

So, how can a small business with a far more moderate budget compete? Niche Marketing! People searching for information on products don’t always use the keywords you would expect them to use. And just because a competitor

has a large enough budget to reach the top with a certain keyword or phrase doesn’t mean you will be able to. Niche phrases are sets of keywords that people are using to search in the search engines. If you are able to rate high on these niche phrases you will see an increase of traffic to your site. To find out what words people are using you need to use one of the word tracking sites. These sites find out from the search engines exactly what phrases your potential customers are using.

For example a Google search of “used cars” turned up 36,900,000 results; if you don’t show up in the first 10-30 results it is very unlikely you will ever have someone click on your site. In this case every major car dealer and thousands of smaller dealers are competing for those same 10-30 spaces. You have a huge amount of competition. Likely though your potential customers also see this huge number and if he or she can’t find what they are looking for they will try to limit the search. If they are looking for a local dealer they may try adding a city. My office is near Redding California. By entering “used cars Redding”, I still receive 205, 000 results. That’s a lot closer and maybe I could optimize my pages to reach near the top, BUT will my efforts really produce the results I want?

So far I have only guessed that my potential customers are really using this search phrase. If I check my competitor’s site I will only be able to see their guesses. That is where word tracking comes to play.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

One of the strongest tools I use is the Google Adwords suggestion tool. Google is by far the stongest of the search engines and over 3/4 of my searches come from Google so it makes sense to see what they feel are the most popular keywords.

First thing is to create a list of possible words and phrases and add them to the "word or phrase" box. On my adsense sites I also like to add the column "Estimated Avg. CPC" to get an idea what sort of prices people are paying Adwords to be listed in the results. You don't get paid that amount, but it stands to reason that if someone is paying Adwords $10,00 per click, you are going to make more per click than if someone is paying $.50 per click.

The Adwords selection tool will then give you suggestions on good keywords. Competition can be a good thing is this case. The more competative the word or phrase is, the more people are paying to be seen on sites that use the phase. There for they must have found this keyword or keyphrase effective enough to pay well for it.

Global and Local monthly searches are important depending on what your site is better geared toward. We pay more attention to the Local Monthly Searches when we are working with a site that is regionalized, otherwise the Global Monthly Searches is more important.

When working with local searches the Local Search Trends column is helpful. If there is a large increase in the Dec, Jan, Feb area, then it wouldn't make much sense to heavily promote a winter based article in spring, save that promotion fo a few months before December.

Spying On Competitors

The Google Adwords keyword tool is also useful to see how well your competitors are doing. You can add a website in the Website box and have Google tell you what it thinks the page is about, how many people search for those keywords and how much people are paying to be seen on those pages.

We also use this tool to tweek the SEO on our own sites. Sometimes adding a couple keywords to an article can make a huge difference to the articles traffic.

Keyword Tracking Tools

There are a number of sites that offer word-tracking services. Some are free, others charge for their service. Word tracking tool are a good second step. These tools help you see how many searches are being made on other search engines for the keyword.  The most cost effective service I have found is a service called Word Tracker . This is the site many SEO companies will use to do your keyword search for you, you can save money by doing the work yourself. If you don't have the time companies like ADAC Programming can do the work for you.

The advantage I’ve found using Word Tracker over the free sites is that at the free sites you are told how many times a word has been searched for but there is little or no other information provided. These extra features are what help you to make the best decision on your keywords. These features include keyword suggestions based on your starting keyword, and most importantly the ratio of how many people use that phrase verses how many competitors are using the phrase. It takes a little time to learn how to make the best use of word tracking software, but it is well worth the effort. If you are having someone else optimize your site, insist that they find out what phrases are being used.

Using word tracking you will be able to tell how much competition you have for each phrase and how often the phrase gets used, so that you can optimize a web site page for phrases that will get clicks to your site. To illustrate the point, would you rather have 0% of the clicks resulting from 1000 searches or 20% of the clicks resulting from 100 searches? If you choose keyword phrases that will put you at the top of the search engines lists you are far more likely to see results you want.

That’s the benefit of choosing your keywords wisely!

Article Source: ADAC Programming