By Louise McDonnell of http://www.2Market.ie
So you want your website to be found by potential customers? Well, the first thing I recommend for my clients, is to research what words and phases people are using for searches relating to what they are selling.
Don’t use guesswork!
I come across companies all the time that use words throughout their websites, that they think people are using to search for their products. Not only that, they also monitor their websites’ performance in Google vis-à-vis these words and phrases.
But what if you’re optimising your website for the wrong words and phrases?
Google takes the guesswork out of this important task by providing a tool which clearly reports how many searches that actually took place for whatever word or phrase you select. Not only that, you can monitor monthly searches for any country in the world.
So whereas “Irish Gift Store” had 1600 searches in Google in the USA in December, the term “Irish Gifts” had 33,100.
Similarly “slimming tablets” had 8100 searches in Ireland in January 2011, whereas “diet pills” had 5400 and “slimming pills” had 1300.
This tool will identify the best selection of words and phrases to use. It eliminates guesswork!
So before you write the content of your website, choose your meta titles, description or analyse your performance in Google – make sure you research what you want to be found for!
The Google Keyword Tool will also show you monthly variations for your keyword searches – thus allowing you to plan your online advertising campaigns. So my client selling diet pills will run a campaign in January and May when searches for their products are at their peak.
So – what are you waiting for – check out Google’s Keyword External Tool at: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Hi Louise, this is great advice. I used the Keyword Tool on my site http://www.enniscrone.ie and found that several keyword I was focusing on had low “Local Monthly Searches” .
ReplyDeleteWhat is also very useful is the “Competition” index. Here I found several great keywords that have a high “Local Monthly Searches” but low competition. By using these keywords I will be able to attract new customers with little effort. If you have any other tips and tricks to improve SEO I would be glad to hear from you.