Key lessons to finding the right keywords for your small business –

Do you find choosing keywords for your small business, confusing? Are you uncertain as to what’s key in choosing keywords that are right for your business? Do you know if your current keywords are even working? This post hopefully will help you understand these challenges by providing insights into identifying keyword opportunities. But before we start, let’s take a step back and understand first, why keywords are so important to your small business website.

Today, more than ever, people are habitually using search engines to help them find the products or services that they’re looking for. We type keywords into sites like Google and Bing hoping to find the results we’re after. Search engines rank sites related to these keywords based on relevance and authority.

You may not be aware of the fact that your website is already targeting certain keywords. That’s because search engines find you by extracting these keywords from your on-page text, headers, page titles, inbound links, and other factors. The challenge is that you may not be targeting any of those keywords. Hence, choosing the right keywords, and using them properly, is often the difference between getting found in search engines and not getting found. As a result, keyword research is the foundation of an effective Internet marketing strategy.

Keyword selection

Keyword selection is impacted by several variables that essentially can be divided into two groups: primary and prioritization variables. 

Primary selection of keywords
The different variables or characteristics of a keyword help determine whether the keywords are worth consideration in your SEO and Inbound marketing strategy. So what considerations do you look for in judging primary keyword selections?
       • Ensuring keyword terms/phrases have sufficient search volumes
       • Ensuring the chosen keyword terms are relevant
       • Assessing levels of relative competition
If a search term doesn’t satisfy the sufficient volume or the relevancy criterion, then it should not be considered. 

Prioritizing of keywords
First generate a keyword opportunity list. Then consider these two things when prioritizing your keywords:
       • Competitive advantage for the product/services
       • Profitability of the products/services associated with the keywords

Generating the initial keyword opportunity list
The first phase involves brainstorming as many keywords as possible.
       • Listing root brands and product/service names (e.g. website designer)
       • Brainstorming variations of product and brand-related keywords
       • Talking to clients to determine what terms they use in search
       • Studying competitors’ sites
       • Adding geographic variations (e.g. Toronto website designers, Ontario website
         designers)
       • Adding descriptive variations (e.g. small business website designers, ecommerce
         website designers)
       • Taking all the variations and entering them into the Google Adwords Tool, which will
         suggest numerous other variations.

Now this list must be filtered.

Choosing relevant keyword terms/phrases
Quality traffic will convert faster, so make sure that you filter your keywords for relevancy. For example: it would not make sense to try and achieve a ranking for the generic term ‘dentist’ alone. Less than 1% of the queries for dentist would be a potential client. Dentist is too generic a term to be relevant or to be meaningful to your small dental practice in Paris, Ontario.

Assessing keyword competitiveness
When assessing your keywords in Google Adwords, make sure that the search terms you’re targeting have sufficient traffic – BUT not too much. Too much correlates with higher competition. I use Google Adwords Tool, to help me assess keyword competitiveness. The tool classifies keywords as either low, medium or highly competitive. Generally speaking, the higher the difficulty score will require much more than just on-page optimization for you to show up on page one in search results.

Finding the right keywords and phrases for your business is no easy task. I encourage you to set aside the appropriate amount of time and resources to do diligence with your keyword research and ultimate keyword selection.

Here are a few other resources, each offer powerful keyword research tools that will assist you in developing a winning keyword strategy. The only downside (if at all) is that there is a fee attached to using them. Most offer a free trial so you can try them out before you invest.

• freekeywords.wordtracker.com Offers a free 7 day trial. 

• tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook Offers a free trial to their Keyword Tool

• keyworddiscovery.com and another free trial