Keyword Research Video Introduction

Keyword Research Guide For Small Businesses

In this article I’m going to introduce you to the concept of keyword research, and explain why it is so important for your business if you are looking to receive traffic from the search engines.

Then I’ve got a video for you that will teach you the basics of how you can do your own keyword research.

Why Is Keyword Research So Important

Keyword research helps you create a strategy for your SEO that will deliver the best possible results for your business in the shortest possible time.

By taking the time to do this properly you won’t be wasting time, effort and money optimising your site the wrong way for the wrong things

So What Is Keyword Research

Keyword research is the process of figuring out what search terms people are using to look for information related to your line of business.

By knowing exactly what these phrases are, you can makes the necessary changes to your website to give yourself the best possible chance of being highly ranked for those phrases.

The more targeted a search term is, the more valuable it is for your business – I’ll explain this concept in the video.

For those of you who aren’t quite sure, a keyword doesn’t have to be just one word – it is a term used to describe a string of words, long or short, that are typed into Google to search for information.

So the word ‘golf’ typed into Google is a keyword. The phrase ‘cheap golf courses in Hobart’ is also considered to be a single keyword.

When there are a number of words used in a single keyword, it is also known as a ‘long-tail keyword’. These are more targeted search phrases that in general you want to achieve rankings for because the competition is lower, and the person doing the searching is closer to making a decision to spend some money.

Start Broad And Narrow Your Focus

A good technique to use when you first start off with your keyword research, is to look at the broad phrases related to your business and then narrow your focus to the point where you have a nice list of highly targeted keywords.

I’ll demonstrate this technique in the video

The tool that I use in the video is the Google External Keyword Tool.

This is a free tool that I’d highly recommend you at least have a bit of a play around with, especially if you’re looking to improve your rankings in Google.

If there is anything from the video that you don’t understand, feel free to leave a comment or a question below and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Craig

Click Here To Watch The Keyword Research Video

Keyword Mapping For Small Businesses

Once you’ve done your keyword research, and identified the phrases that you believe to have the most relevance and profit potential, you need to match each of these keywords to a particular page on your site.

This is a much better strategy than just attempting to get your home page to rank for all the keywords on your list – I’ll explain why.

One of the most important factors that helps determine the rankings success of a web page is relevancy.

How well does the content on the web page match the particular keyword you are targeting?

I’ll give you an example that should make things a little clearer for you.

Let’s say you run an alternative health studio that caters for a large range of classes from Yoga to Pilates, Bowen Therapy, Swiss Ball classes, maternity classes and any other class you can think of.

Option A

You attempt to have your homepage rank for as many of these keywords as you can. You figure it doesn’t really matter which keywords get ranked, as long as people find your site, they will see what else you offer and will be able to make their decision accordingly.

Option B

You create a separate page for each specific class that you offer, then work towards having each of those pages rank for just two or three very specific keywords that are highly relevant.

Now obviously the second option will take a little more work to set up, but I’m sure you can see how much more powerful this strategy is.

By narrowing your focus you give each page a much better chance of ranking for the selected keywords.

Once that page is ranking well, your visitors will be finding the exact information the were looking for as opposed to being greeted with a generic home page and then having to look for the information themselves.

People’s attention span is short online, so if the navigation of your website is not clear, you will lose a visitor that cannot quickly locate what they’re looking for.

Keyword Mapping – A Simple Strategy To Use

Keyword mapping is simply the process of taking your list of words that you put together in your keyword research, and deciding which pages on your website they are most relevant to. This gives those web pages the best possible chance of being found in the search engines.

Keywords vary in how specific they are. Some are broad, some are much more specific. The more specific a keyword is, the deeper inside your website the page should be that ranks for that keyword.

Broad keywords such as men’s birthday present would be mapped to a general page on your website such as your homepage.

A more specific keyword such as men’s designer wallets would be mapped to a slightly more targeted web page such as a product category page that shows a range of different wallets from a number of designers.

Highly targeted search terms like Marc Jacob men’s wallet should be targeted at web pages that sell individual products from that brand.

So What You Need To Do

To effectively map your keywords, you need to break your business up into its various components – the different products and services – and then make sure that you have web pages that are focused solely on each of those.

If everything you have and do in your business is lumped onto one or two pages, you will reduce the ability of your website to rank for as many keywords as possible.

This process does take some work initially – keyword research, keyword mapping, building extra web pages – but if you are serious about having a website that works, this process is vital for your success.

Craig

Get Multiple Pages Of Your Site To Rank In Google

This is just a quick article – but its an important one for small business owners. It helps you understand why doing your keyword research is so important.

I’ll start off with a statement that might not make sense to you straight away, but it should by the end of this article.

Your website doesn’t get ranked in Google…the individual pages that makes up your website each have the opportunity to be ranked separately.

The reason there is often some confusion with this, is that for the majority of small businesses it is the homepage that gets ranked in Google, and nothing else.

But a smart business owner will understand that they are better off mapping their target keywords to the most relevant pages, and then attempting to get each of those web pages to rank for the specific keywords.

This way you can have 5,10 or more web pages that are getting ranked by Google, for highly targeted keywords. When your potential customer searches for these keywords, and is presented with a page on your site that solves the exact problem they have, your chances of turning them into a paying customer increase exponentially.

And As An Added Bonus

Have you ever done a search on Google, and you came across a website that was listed, then immediately below it and slightly indented was a listing from the same website

A double listing for that business on Google!

Have you ever wondered how you get those double listings?

Well the best way to start if by doing exactly what I’ve been telling you here. Map your keywords with the aim of getting internal pages of your website to rank.

When you do this often what will happen is Google will see that your home page is relevant to your keyword AND the internal page is relevant as well.

So it will list both in the rankings, doubling the exposure your business gets from Google.

Research has shown that websites that get these double listings are much more likely to be clicked on than the other results.

And it is not that hard to get them, you just need to be smart and set your web pages up to rank for specific keywords rather than every keyword.

Craig

Small Business SEO Explained

When it comes to getting visitors to your website, there is no cheaper way than the free traffic that comes from having a web page that ranks near the top of the search results.

But how does this happen? What does it take to get your own website to rank ahead of all your competitors?

The process behind improving a websites rankings is known as search engine optimisation (SEO).

Many people find the whole field of SEO a bit confusing, but this is only because so many people do such a poor job of explaining in layman’s terms how it all works.

Personally I like to keep things simple and avoid all the BS industry jargon that some people seem to think makes them sound impressive.

In this series of articles I’m going to simplify it all for you and explain what factors affect a websites rankings, but more importantly for you, which of these factors you need to be worried about and which you can ignore completely.

The 80/20 rule is most definitely in effect when it comes to small business SEO – if you can take care of a few key factors, you will immediately have an advantage over the majority of your competition.

So How Do The Search Engines Work?

In Australia there are three major search engines – Google, MSN (who have just launched their new search engine, Bing) and Yahoo.

As a rough estimate Google gets about 65% of the users, and the other two are fairly evenly split – so you really want to be focusing your efforts on pleasing Google, and you’ll get traffic from the other two anyway.

Basically Google has digital spiders that go out and crawl web sites, cataloguing their content and assessing the quality based on a mathematical algorithm. This algorithm is what determines how well a web page is ranked in Google’s search results

This mathematical algorithm is constantly being tinkered with by Google, and is made up of too many different variables to list here.

Each of these variables is given a weighting – so for small business SEO, you need to start off by knowing what the most important variables are and getting those right.

In the majority of cases this will be enough for you to get ranked ahead of most your competitors.

And that’s exactly what you’re going to learn over the course of the next few articles – which are the most important SEO variables, and what you can do to improve your websites performance in those areas.

On-page Versus Off-Page Variables

There are two main categories when it comes to factors that affect your rankings.

On Page Factors – as the name suggests these are the various elements that make up your own website. By understanding the importance of a few key elements, you can make some simple changes to your website which can move you up the rankings

Off Page Factors – this basically refers to links that are pointed from other websites to pages on your own website. These are also known as incoming or inbound links.

I’ll talk about both of these categories in more depth in future articles.

But before you can begin looking at on or off page factors, there is some important groundwork that needs to be done first. This is something that the majority of small businesses do not do, and just by understanding this process you will immediately put yourself in a good position to generate more targeted traffic to your website.

The process I’m talking about is keyword research and it is the platform that allows you to more effectively optimise your website to take advantage of the free traffic available.

In the next article I’m going to introduce you to keyword research, as well as give you access to a video that teaches you how you can use a free tool from Google to better understand what keywords have the most profit potential for you business.

Craig