3 Tips When Doing Keyword Research

So your business is taking off and you’ve got your website running but you’re not getting anyone visiting your site. How do change that?

More often than not, the problem is with the words you’ve got on your site. Websites are all about having lots of different content – pictures, sound, text and videos – but no-one will find your content if you do not pay attention to keywords and phrases when you are writing the text. You might even have a lot of people visiting your site but very few buying anything from you – this is another problem that can be solved with some careful attention to keywords.

What Keywords should I Use?

It’s no use pulling people to your site if you are not what they’re looking for, they will not buy from you. Focus on attracting people who want your service. A keyword search that includes the word “PayPal” or “credit card” is, 99 per cent of the time, made by someone who wants to spend money – and these are the holy grail of online customers. Get them to your website by having these keywords contained in your website text.

Tip #1: Attract more paying customers to your website by including keywords that relate to online purchasing methods.

On Page SEO

This is directly related to what we were talking about above – it is the words you use on your website itself. But how many people type just one word into a search engine box? Very few. You need to be thinking in terms of phrases, not just single words that relate to your product. About 5 to 7 word phrases are the best things to enhance your on page SEO. Try not to get caught up focusing on your business when you’re making keyword phrases. Instead, think about what people might ask in a keyword search and how it applies to you. For example, a keyword phrase for a landscaping business might be “garden design front yard trees” or for a hairdresser, “professional hair dye natural ingredients”.

When you are looking for keywords, there’s nothing wrong with scoping out your competition. Try entering your potential keywords into a search box and see what pops up, and if the results at the top of the list are similar to your business. When you’re doing this, remember to put your keyword search in quotations – “keyword search”. This way you will only get results that have this exact phrase in them. Another way to further refine your search is to use the inanchor: and intitle: tags. These will refine your results even further to pages that have your keywords in the anchor or titles of the site.

Tip #2: To improve your on page SEO, use everyday phrases that relate to your business without using professional language.

Off Page SEO

Off page SEO is, as you have probably worked out, about optimising your search engine results through strategies that are implemented outside of your website. Basically, it is about getting other websites to link to you. Unfortunately it’s not as easy as I’ll-link-to-you-if-you-link-to-me, Google in particular hates sites that do this. Rather, you need to build your online profile, publish lots of high-quality content and let people know it is there. In theory, if you’re advertising your online presence to the right and relevant websites, they will link to your information.

Tip #3: Off page SEO works best when you are being linked to by websites that compliment your own. For example, if you sell skin products, you want a beauty site to link to you.