If you want to be found on Google, you need to have a broad understanding of keywords and how they should be used in your website marketing.
The following post is a very brief introduction to keywords.
Google is basically just a very powerful word search machine, so if you type in ‘book shops‘ Google will search through the billions of words on millions of websites to find what appears to be the best results for your search.
So if you own a book shop it might seem like a good idea to target the term ‘book shops‘ on your website?
Find out why keywords are still so very important for SEO right here.
Unfortunately, this is NOT the case if you are a small business!!!
This is because there are lots of searches and competition for the term ‘book shops‘; at the time of writing Waterstone comes top of Google for this term, and in reality, for a small business to compete against Waterstones for this term would be very challenging.
But worry not, all you need to do is think of keywords or key phrases that are more specific to your business, such as ‘book shops Glasgow‘, and immediately you are reducing the competition for that phrase and targetting customers who may be more interested in your business.
Google have a great tool for analysing these phrases to help you chose which ones to target called the Keyword Tool; see the results for ‘book shops‘ and ‘book shops Glasgow‘:
As you can see “book shops Glasgow” has much fewer searches and less competition, thus for a small business they are much more likely to be found for this term than just for ‘book shops‘.
So the first step of every small business web marketing strategy is to brainstorm and use the Google keyword tool (plus others which I’ll review at a later date) to determine 5 – 10 key phrases that you are initially going to target – everything else will flow from here.
So do not delay, get going with your keyword research today!
The beginners’ guide to SEO will help to point you in the right direction. Click here for more.
We cover this subject in much greater depth throughout the rest of our blog.
Hands-on SEO expert since 2011. Owner of two loan comparison websites that regularly compete with Moneysupermarket.com & Gocompare.com. I specialise in SEO Audits, Strategy, Training, and Support. Let’s Connect.