Grow Your Business With Good Keyword Research

I want you to imagine you're building a vegetable garden. You've got the shape plotted out in your yard and you're standing there with all the plants ready and waiting in their pots. The only problem is you don't know what kind of soil to use. You have two options: use the pile of dirt that you dug up from the yard to build the garden; or talk to your local nursery and buy the most appropriate soil for your plants.

The dirt in the yard seems like a good option because it's cheap and easy, but it's not suited to your vegetables and you'll probably end up spending all your time trying to fix it. Buying the good soil might cost you a little more but you know that it's giving your plants the best opportunity right from the start, which ultimately means less time focusing on the soil and more time appreciating the rewards of your healthy, fresh vegetable garden.

Good Keyword Research is a lot like choosing the soil for your garden. Get it wrong and you are setting up your online campaign for trouble. You'll be forever trying to fix your keyword list by identifying inappropriate words and phrases, by which time it's usually too late because you've already noticed a lack of quality traffic to your site. But get it right from the start and you'll achieve high quality, relevant traffic, and spend less time fixing the foundations of your campaign and more time focusing on the stuff that matters - enquiries and sales!


Think Like Your Audience:

You may know exactly what your site is about, all of the pages it contains and each and every product it sells, however this makes it difficult to predict what your market actually types into their search engines when they're looking for your products. It is convenient to assume that people search for your products the same way that you, as the business owner, would search, using product names and specific industry terms.

But it is important not to fall into this trap when building your initial keyword list. It is vital to be able to step back from your industry and think about your audience. This is when utilising the skills of an agency represents a lot of value as they can use a number of tools which take out a lot of the guesswork and can provide estimates on how much traffic each keyword will achieve for your site and how much each will cost per click.


Become The King Of Your Category

Often businesses will want to be in number one position for a particular keyword, to which the first question should be "why?" and "will it get you the best quality traffic, or just the most amount of traffic?". Understanding this difference is important.

Let's say your garden is now in full bloom and you've now got a healthy collection of bright red tomatoes you want to start selling online. Initial keyword research reveals there are 1,000 searches a day for the broad term "vegetables", and 100 searches a day for the phrase "buy tomatoes online". Focusing on the keyword "vegetables" will deliver heaps of impressions, a few clicks, and maybe even a sale or two. But while these 1,000 searches for "vegetables" includes people looking to buy tomatoes online, the majority of this traffic is made up of unwanted searches like "fruit and vegetables", "recipes with vegetables", and "how to grow vegetables". The chances of this traffic clicking through to your website is very low, which means wasted display impressions and lost sales.

Instead you want to be targeting those users who are searching for phrases like "buy tomatoes", "buy tomatoes online" and at the more specific level, "buy tomatoes online in brisbane". These search terms achieve less daily traffic, but because they relate directly to your product they are far more likely to result in clicks through to your site and online sales. The goal here, particularly for small businesses, is to become a little fish in a little pond, rather than a little fish in a big pond. That is, becoming the king of the Online Tomatoes category and gaining a large share of the traffic, rather than casting a wide net and trying to compete with businesses who dominate the broader Fruit and Vegetable category.


Focusing your keyword list around these tight themes will generate the best quality traffic for your site, which means less money wasted on irrelevant clicks and ultimately more sales for your business and a better return on your online investment.

This article was posted by Chris Pahor. Chris is a specialist in Search Engine Marketing at Traffika. You can follow Chris on Twitter @chrispahor.