Unlike the Yellow Pages, the Internet is not simply organized by categories. Most people find information on the internet by visiting a search engine and entering words into a search box. It’s your job to figure out which words or phrases people are most likely to type to find you.
There are basically 2 types of searches that people perform online: Discovery and Recovery.
In a discovery search, the user typically has a problem and is looking for all the available solutions. For instance, “leaking pipes”, “weight loss solution” or “best plasma TV”.
With a recovery search, people are looking for information they already know exists. They may search for a specific brand, model number, or business name.
It’s important that you identify both types of keywords so you can reach prospects during all stages of their buying cycle. Just be sure to spend more on phrases that indicate they’re ready to buy over ones that suggest they’re still doing research.
Google has a FREE tool that helps you to easily identify the words or phrases that people are searching for that relate to your business. It is located at: http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Simply enter as many phrases as you can think of that someone might type into a search box when searching for your business and the Google keyword tool will return a list of hundreds of related words and synonyms along with the actual number of searches that occur for each phrase.
Tips for using the Google Keyword tool effectively:
1. Develop a list of the core products & services you offer. Include specific brand names and model numbers.
2. Combine your core list with geographic terms such as city names, states you do business in, zip codes, area codes, neighborhood names etc.. You can also combine your core terms with action words like “Stop, Fix, Prevent, Solve, Buy, Purchase, Order etc…”
3. Pay attention to the words or phrases that are returned but aren’t related to your business. You probably want to use those as negative keywords which we’ll discuss later in this guide.
4. Identify the phrases with a good search volume (>1000 month) and low competition (<1 million sites) and build your website pages around these phrases.
5. Use the top 10 terms from step 4 and then search google for each term. Enter the website url of the top 3 results into the keyword tool’s URL tab to uncover even more keywords you might have missed.
6. Use the keyword phrases you identified in step 4 in the Title tag, meta description, H1 tags, link text and page url whenever possible.