Keywords help you focus your marketing

Keywords are an amazing piece of the puzzle for internet marketing and as an Internet Marketing Consultant we start every campaign by asking, what are the keywords we are concerned with? But what if you don’t really know what keywords are?  The simple answer is that keywords are the search phrases we all type into the Google search box. When you know which keywords people are typing into the search engines that are relevant for your business and industry then you have a much better chance of attracting new visitors to your website.  Keywords help you convert a greater percentage of those people into leads so you can eventually get more clients.

But how do keywords work?  How can they help us do all of this and give us focus? Let me try and explain as if you were one of our clients sitting in our cozy conference room.

To understand the value of keywords it’s important for us to talk about three things:

1. What is a keyword?
2. How do we find out what keywords people are searching for?
3. What do we do with the keywords after we find out?

1.  What is a keyword?

Keyword is the industry jargon for the words we type into a search engine.  Even though the term “keyword” is singular it really refers to any word or phrase we type into the little search box.  In a previous blog I called them search terms and phrases.  These are the questions we ask Google in the hope of finding an answer and sometimes we ask in unique ways.  For instance:

• SF, CA, Ice Cream
• Ice Cream in San Francisco, Best
• Where is really good Ice Cream near the Hilton in San Francisco

It’s these phrases and the millions of others like them that we all type into Google every day.  These phrases are what we call keywords, and I think they get their name simply because we often just type in the “key words” of our questions.

2.  How do we find out what keywords people are searching for?

Let me tell you a short story. Imagine you’re sitting at your computer, like before, and you want to find the best ice cream in San Francisco since you are visiting there soon. You pull up Google, type in your question and look for answers. You might not find what you want on the first try, or you may just want to see if saying it another way will help you find a better response. As you are doing this imagine that there is a guy at Google, let’s call him Chip, reading his computer screen as you type. As you type, Chip reads your request. Chip is like the old telegraph guys who translated and wrote down the Morse code and delivered the message to the right person. Your search is the message and they are receiving it and trying to translate what you mean.  Chip copies your “Keyword Search” on to a master list and then they look up web pages that best match the websites he thinks will answer your search. Chip then sends a list of those websites back to you. Sometimes Chip is right and sometimes Chip is wrong. That’s why you have learned to do more than one search. At the end of Chip’s shift he clocks out and turns in the list of “Keyword Searches” he answered that day. You find the ice cream shop you are looking for and walk away from you computer thinking about how good the ice cream will be on your coming holiday and never give the process of your Google search another thought.

So remember the list that Chip turned in at the end of the day to show what he had done? Well that list gets published, without your name, along with every other search that was made for that month. Those searches can be accessed through a tool that Google offers called the Adwords Keyword Tool. Original isn’t it? And that is how we find out what keywords people are searching for?

3.  What do we do with keywords after we find them?

Once we have done our research and evaluated which Keywords look like the best to start with we take those keywords and move onto the next step. We take our web pages and our blogs and we incorporate them into what we have written.  For example, my company referred to services for marketing on the internet as, “online marketing.” When we did our keyword research we found out that more people were searching for, “internet marketing” so we changed it. Why did we change it?

We changed it because when Chip over at Google reads someone’s keyword search he looks for exact matches on websites all over the internet. Remember that he really wants to give you the best answer possible to everyone’s searches. By making that one change Chip will see us as more relevant to people searching for internet marketing. In the end we become better communicators because we are answering the questions people are asking and not what we THINK people are asking and because of that Chip moves us up the Google rankings and more people come to our site. When they do, they hopefully find the answer to their question and stick around awhile.

So in the end keywords and keyword research turn out to be the best and most authentic methods for customer research an Internet Marketing Consultant has. It really will help you get more clients.