Luke Brown Marketing Blog

Archive for the ‘Keywords’ Category

When business owners looking to improve search engine rankings interview SEO services firms, many say they want to rank high for a list of specific keywords. That supreme self-confidence, a benefit in most business areas, is short-sighted, inefficient and foolish.

Business owners should leave the job of keyword research to the SEO services firm. Search engine optimization requires multiple sources of market research to determine the best keywords for a website. Keyword criteria includes popularity and relevance, factors a business owner may not be familiar with.

Having a business owner tell me what keywords they want to rank for is the same as me telling the business owner how best to sell their product. That would be foolish since I don’t know their business and they don’t know mine.

Keywords Which Don’t Work

When a business owner has a list of keywords they want to rank for, it’s very common to see many individual words, instead of keyword phrases, which would generally be more accurate.

*Most Individual keywords are very difficult to rank for. For example, lamps. There are too many variations of lamps. It’s much easier to get first page ranking for a more specific term, like Tiffany table lamps. Keywords of three words or more are referred to as ‘long tail keywords’.

*Use keywords directly related to your business. Not only will you get better traffic, you won’t run the risk of being labeled a ’spam’ site. That’s not to say you can’t use a very popular event to draw traffic to your site. Just make sure it ties in with your site.

Immediately following Micheal Jackson’s death, search queries for Jackson soared exponentially. If somebody used ‘Michael Jackson’ as a keyword for a towel website, but didn’t have a Michael Jackson towel, they sure won’t retain that visitor as a regular customer. With the potential of that disgruntled website visitor tweeting that your site is a scam or spam, the payoff is obviously not worth it for legitimate businesses.

Keyword Tactics Which Work

It’s important to understand that ‘keywords’ doesn’t just mean words, but can also refer to phrases having two or more words. Simply eliminating most single word keywords and replacing them with keyword phrases of two words or longer can often double a websites traffic.

*Optimize each page for 2-3 keywords. The purpose is to have the most highly targeted visitor come to your website, on a page as closely related to their search query as possible. While this produces less overall traffic, it produces much higher conversions.

*Use no more than 10 keywords per page. Some sites have thousands of keywords, but not every one is on every page. If you have an e-commerce website which has free shipping on every item, then ‘free shipping’ would be an appropriate keyword to use on every page.

This also helps ranking factors when obtaining backlinks. Backlinks should go to multiple pages on a website, not just the home page. If the anchor text being used matches a keyword, you’ll get the most SEO value from the backlink (assuming everything else is done correctly).

*Use Google Analytics to find out your site’s most popular keywords. The ‘Traffic Sources Overview’ shows the most popular keywords visitors used to find your site. Sometimes, the same words are popular month after month after month. At other times, keywords may change often. Being able to discern a trend and turning it to your advantage can generate huge increases in traffic to a website.

The Bottom Line

Choosing keywords is a very important function for new websites. Once established, it’s rare, though not uncommon, for a site to be ranked on the first page with zero keywords.  These sites have thousands or tens of thousands of links. For the rest of websites, however, choosing and adding keywords is both a skill and an art and should not be taken lightly.

About 80% of the time a business owner gives me list of keywords, half or more of them are useless. Sure, that’s anecdotal but when it comes to driving traffic to your website, you have two choices: you can go with your gut or your can choose targeted and statistically proven keywords to generate traffic, leads and sales. Now there is an easy decision for any busy business owner.

For a free keyword analysis of your website, call Luke Brown Marketing toll-free at (877) 877-1507.