adrianmott.com

This is part 1 of a multi-part internet marketing post.  This part will focus on Keyword research – more to come very soon.

Internet marketing, and especially SEO and SEM has been something that I’ve been very interested in over the past year, as I’ve been doing a lot of learning over that time.  I wanted to use this post to point a few lessons that I’ve learned that will allow you – a presumed business owner or website administrator – drive more traffic to your business or site.  This first post is some fairly broad thoughts on keyword research, a part of internet marketing that I believe to be the most crucial.  These ideas are here to help to guide you toward success when using the web and its incredible potential as a marketing tool and lead generator.

People search for things that they want.  They use Google and Yahoo and Bing and Ask.com to search for and research the what, where, how and why of the products and services they consume.  It’s something like 80% of the American population these days.  The internet works for this purpose, we all know this.  So how to you get your business or website noticed by this HUGE chunk of the population looking for products and information that you’re providing?  The answer, as I’m coming to understand, lies in defining and focusing on a more clear and succinct message throughout the content that you put on the web.  For each site, having certain clear keywords (key-phrases is more like it) that are incorporated into a site’s  content as much as possible.

It should be fairly obvious to the casual onlooker what some of these are on this site (’Boston Startups’, ‘Today in Technology’, etc…).  These are keywords that I’ve determined are potentially ‘win-able’ based upon the competition that’s out there at the moment.  I want to stress the importance of the ‘win-able’ keyword.  When I refer to a keyword that’s win-able, I mean that your business or site appears at or near the top of search engine results when searched for.  This is typically the stage where you need to think about exactly what it is that your business or website produces and delivers in terms or products and services.  It’s also the time to consider your competition.  If you’re starting a company that sells shoes for example, then you’re going to be facing some very stiff competition on the web from the likes of Zappos and Shoes.com and other major retail stores.

Realistically, you aren’t going to win the keyword ‘Shoes’ or even ‘Internet Shoe Store’.  You’re going to have to focus on exactly what you’re trying to sell and pinpoint those keywords.  ‘Cheap Beach Sandals’ or ‘Black Leather Loafers’ as examples.  Just like your build your business one brick at a time, you need to focus on the win-able keywords first and once you win your initial keywords, you can work your way up and compete with the more difficult keywords.

Many people may think that keywords are a simple list of everything that your business or site has to do with – lists of single words that are separated by commas that get thrown into a site’s meta keywords HTML tag, but this isn’t really the way it works and certainly not how you want to approach your keywords.  For example, (because right now I’m sitting in Toscanini’s Coffee and Ice Cream Shop, I’ll use them as an example) Toscanini’s website (when they were starting out at least) probably wouldn’t want to target the keywords ‘ice cream‘ or ‘coffee shop’ as keywords that they could win.  Something more along the lines of ‘delicious ice cream cambridge’ or ‘coffee and ice cream central square’ would probably be more fitting for a small business.  Toscanini’s though, with it’s absolutely fantastic ice cream and high praise, does appear to show on the first page of Google results for the keyword ‘ice cream’, which is awesome.

I believe Pete Caputa over at Hubspot said it best: ‘Keyword research should guide every one of your online marketing activities‘.  He’s right, keyword research isn’t a one shot deal – if you really want to accomplish true internet marketing success, then keyword research should be done for every piece of content you publish to the web – every blog post, every new page you post with content, you get the idea.  Keyword research to me is a lot like changing the oil in your car, you can’t really do it TOO much, and it should be revisited and revised every few months.

So in review – here are my summarized points:

1. When choosing keywords to target, make sure you choose ‘win-able’ phrases – start small and work up!!
2. Pay attention to your competition’s keywords – especially in local markets.
3. Keyword research is an ongoing endeavor – perform it on as much content and as often is possible for you.