Using the right keywords on your website

Knowing and using the right keywords for your website is so important and it is one of the main areas where small businesses fall down in their web strategy. Sometimes this is because it’s time consuming to research and identify the most effective keywords and can seem complicated but mostly, in our experience, it’s because no one has really explained why and how you should be doing it. Poor keyword research and utilisation is one of the main reasons why people and businesses aren’t successful on the internet.

Optimising your website for your keywords

As we already know search engines are looking for fresh, relevant content for the searches that are made and the way they do that is to crawl through the internet looking for ‘key words’ that indicate what the website pages are about.

So, the idea is that you ‘optimise’ (and by that I mean create, update and tweak) your website with appropriate keywords so that the search engines, and therefore, prospects can find you. This coupled with adding regular fresh content (with the right keywords) to your website can mean the difference between success and failure for your site.

Determining your Keywords

So, what are appropriate keywords for you to use? It isn’t as simple as determining the words that you think best reflect what you are offering, however; if you just work on finding keywords that best reflect what you offer you still may not be found by the right people, or at all. Why do you think that might be? Let’s look at an example:

We run a local business networking group in Shepway in Kent www.counterpointnetworking.co.uk and as part of membership businesses get an entry on our website. We recently had a new member join us, Hannah Joyce from Virtual Girl Friday. She offers the services of a Virtual PA. We posted her business profile not long after she joined and within an hour she was first and second on Google for ‘Virtual PA Shepway’ and on the first page for ‘Virtual PA East Kent’ and ‘Virtual PA South East Kent’. So, you can see that our website is really well optimised for Shepway and quite good for East Kent and South Kent and on the face of it this looks like a good result for her.

However if you do a search on Google’s Keyword Tool (which is part of Google Adwords and is free to use to get information about numbers of searches being made), for the above terms you get the following results (at the time that this was written):

Virtual PA Shepway – not enough data
Virtual PA East Kent – not enough data
Virtual PA South East Kent – not enough data

What does that mean?

Well pretty much no one is searching for that combination of words on Google. So it’s all well and good optimising your site for those words, but if no one is searching for them then there is little point in using those keywords to optimise your website.

So, what should we do instead? We obviously need to determine which keywords people are actually using to search for the type of services that Hannah offers and optimise her business profile on our site (and on her website!) to those terms. In fact if you search for ‘virtual pa’ there were 6,600 searches in the UK in June (the most recent data available) and 12,100 in the world on a monthly basis.

Given that Hannah is offering a virtual service it’s not a bad plan to continue to optimise for Virtual PA but we really need to be looking at other keywords, as much as anything else because a search on Google for Virtual PA shows there are 20 million websites including that term – so quite a bit of competition for that keyword!

‘Long Tail’ Keywords

We need to be thinking about ‘long tail keywords’ to improve the chances of her being found in an appropriate search. What are ‘long tail keywords’? These are keyword phrases that are longer than two words. They are important for at least a couple of reasons (given there is a book called ‘The Long Tail’ by Chris Anderson there will be many more, I’m sure, but as it’s still unread on my Sony E-Reader we will make do with the two main ones that I already know!).

1. If you think about it, if someone is searching using more than two words it is likely that they are searching for something quite specific, and if you have your website optimised for all of those words you are more likely to be found than a website where they are optimising for only one or two of those words. So our Virtual PA example is a good example for this. If someone in Shepway decided that they wanted a ‘local’ Virtual PA service and searched for ‘Virtual PA Shepway’, Hannah would come up top of that search even though there are 20 million websites to choose from that include the term ‘Virtual PA’.

2. It is pretty likely that someone searching for a more specific term is doing so for a specific reason, which is likely in lots of cases to be that they are looking to purchase that product or service; so if you get visitors to your website as a result of a long tail keyword search they are probably more likely to convert into customers (assuming you have made your selling process simple enough for them to follow, your pricing is acceptable etc).

Find other appropriate keywords instead of Virtual ‘PA’

But, getting back to our Virtual PA example, as no one is searching for Virtual PA Shepway we need to find some other words that we can link with ‘virtual pa’ or use to replace ‘virtual pa’ that would make Hannah’s business more likely to be found.

Looking further down the report that we have on Google’s keyword tool when we search for ‘virtual office pa’, we get:

’secretarial services’ 9900
‘typing services’ 3,600
‘virtual assistants’ 3,600
‘virtual secretary’ 1,900
(All UK searches)

So it looks like these are the sorts of keywords that Hannah should be looking to use and this demonstrates one way of coming up with your keywords, to go into the Google Keyword Tool, put in a key phrase that describes your business and, as well as checking search volume for the phrase, you can use it to suggest other keywords that may be appropriate.

‘not enough data’ doesn’t mean ‘no data whatsoever’

I will put a caveat in at this point though; ‘not enough data’ doesn’t mean ‘no data whatsoever’ and for a local business only a few visitors to your website who convert into customers can be very useful so don’t completely write off keyword strings including local geographic words even if they come up as ‘not enough data’ – there may be a few people looking for you and those keywords may turn out to be worthwhile. And, it is definitely something to test and monitor using your website analytics, which will show you how many visitors you get to your website from people using just those terms.

Originally published in Kent on Saturday

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