As mentioned in my first post on this blog, the first step in good SEO is to find the keywords that people are actually searching for – after all, there’s no point in ranking for keywords if no-one types them into the search engines, right?
I often come across clients who ar quite happy with their SEO efforts because, when you type in their company name, they’re number one on Google. That’s all very well if you are Coca Cola, Nike or some other huge brand but if you are Joe’s Widget Store from Victoria and, online, no-one has ever heard of you then the number of searches for ‘Joes Widget Store’ aren’t going to be very high!
So, what keywords should you optimise for and how do you find them?
While there are a few tools on the market to help you with this task, by far the cheapest (it’s free!) and usually one of the most accurate is Google’s own Keyword Tool. Part of the Adwords product, the Keyword Tool is a window into Google’s database of previous searches throughout the world. You can interrogate it for searches from Canada, the USA, the UK, Australia – wherever.
A couple of key things to remember whenever you’re using the Google Keyword Tool though:
- ALWAYS change the ‘Match Type’ (found in the left hand column) to ‘Exact’ from the default ‘Broad’. Why? It’s to do with the way that Google classifies its search types but suffice to say that Broad will give you much higher search numbers than Exact and for SEO purposes it’s the preciseness (is that a real word?) of the Exact match type that we want
- If you don’t already have a Google Adwords account, create one and ALWAYS login to Adwords before you do your keyword searches. Why? When you’re logged into to Adwords you will get many more results than when you’re not – particularly ‘long tail searches’ i.e. searches that contain three or more words in the search phrase. People who type in 3 or more words into their search phrases are much more likely to take action on your website than people who type in one or two keywords (who are more likely to be searching for information).
Have fun with the Google Keyword Tool – it is a great (and free!) resource to find out what is really happening in your industry. It can even tell you which products/services people are actually searching for, giving you the strongest possible indicators of what it is you should be offering your potential clients.
I’ll put together a video showing you how to get the most of the Google Keyword Tool shortly – there’s a lot you can get from it!
Till next time!