Because of this, a critical aspect of optimising your site for high Google rankings is to ensure that your web pages include the keyword phrases your target audience is using.
Read the following excerpt from my book ‘The NZ Small Business Superhero’s Internet Marketing Handbook’ and discover how Google is the key for attracting visitors to your website…
Keyword research to determine the best phrases to use is therefore a crucial step in search engine optimisation. Get this part wrong and your efforts are doomed. It’s that simple. The purpose of the keyword research and selection process is to find all the different variations of keyword phrases that your prospects are likely to use at the search engines.
However, you need to be aware that some of these phrases will be too common, and therefore competitive, for you to realistically hope to get a high ranking for – at least in the short term. In other words, for many of these common phrases there will already be many well-established, trusted pages which contain these phrases in the right places in conjunction with other Google content optimisation factors.
Until you can match them in all these areas, you will struggle to break into the top 10, 20 or 30 listings capable of producing traffic. The idea is to find the keyword phrases that these sites have overlooked. Phrases that have at least some demand, but a low, or moderate, level of competition. These much more specific terms are both easier to compete for at the search engines, as well as much more likely to produce a highly targeted prospect.
Because your site will target different terms on different pages, you can target a range of phrases from competitive to not so competitive. And as we will discuss soon, you can add geographical qualifiers to your phrases so they only relate to a specific area, thereby reducing the competition.
The first step in the keyword research process is to brainstorm some of the main keyword phrases you would like to be found for. If possible, involve your staff and customers. Send out a quick email asking people to list the types of phrases they would use to find a business like yours. This is your seed list.
To read more, you can purchase my book ‘The NZ Small Business Superhero’s Internet Marketing Handbook’ by clicking here.
