Keywords - 5 Things Small Business Owners Need to Know

 Today's post is going to be about keywords and the 5 things you need to know about them. If you understand these 5 points then you'll be well on your way to understanding search engine optimization (SEO) the easy way. Let's get right to it.

1. A keyword can be more than one word, and it usually is. Let's just show you some examples of keywords so as to make this perfectly clear: 

attorneys

attorneys springfield

attorneys springfield ma

personal injury attorneys in western massachusetts

best personal injury lawyer in springfield ma

These are all keywords, from the single word 'attorneys' to the long phrases like 'best personal injury lawyer in springfield ma'.  So, it's important to realize that a keyword is not always just one word. You might have already known this but many people are actually unclear about these details. I want you to leave my blog with a solid understanding of search engine optimization.

     2. Keywords should be targeted specifically to your business or work. Here's an example of how this can be misunderstood. I have a client, an attorney, who had his own ideas about which keywords he wanted to rank for, on page one on Google. He is a really gung-ho guy with lots of energy and motivation. So, he showed me that he entered his Meta Keywords (Meta keywords are placed in a field that you would see if you were working on the administration panel of a website - only search engines can read Meta Keywords - visitors never see them) all by himself. He did a great job of navigating his website on the back end to do this. However, the keywords he chose were not optimal, yet they were all related to his job in one way or another. The keywords he chose were not very targeted but instead were very general.

     His keywords were something like: law, laws, lawyers, lawyer, attorney, attorneys, massachusetts, arrests, accidents etc...  These keywords were not exactly targeted to his specific work. He's a personal injury lawyer whose office is in Springfield MA.  After some discussion we settled on these more targeted keywords: personal injury lawyer springfield ma, accident lawyer chicopee ma, workplace accident lawyer springfield ma, dog bite attorney holyoke ma, etc... 

     3. Good keywords have some traffic. Think of how many people are online every minute of every day! It's amazing when you try to even fathom that. But how many of these internet surfers are actually looking for the services or products you provide? The answer to that question lies here at the Google Keyword Tool. Just go there and type your keyword into the empty field and hit enter. In just a second or two Google will provide you with lots of information, very interesting information indeed. You can quickly learn how many times your keyword was searched on Google in the last month. You can also see if there is high, low or medium competition for this keyword (high competition implies there is money to be made if you show up on page one for this keyword - otherwise there would be no competition!).  You'll also be given a list of related keywords, many of which you might never have thought of.

     We need to choose keywords that have a decent amount of traffic. The more traffic (i.e. searches per month for your product or service) the more visitors you'll have. The more visitors you have the more sales you make. Everyone should understand this pretty easily.  Now, if you happen to be in a market where there aren't that many searches per month, but where each visitor or potential client is worth lots of money, then you have nothing to worry about. For instance, if you have a company that builds very expensive (very) driving simulators (not meant for games but rather to train police, ambulance and fire truck drivers) each visitor could be worth $120,000. Therefore, if you rank at position one in google for this term and you only receive 20 visitors a month - it's still extremely valuable.

     4.  Focus on what's called Buying-Keywords. I'm not talking about purchasing keywords or anything like that. I'm talking about a type of keyword; the type that indicates your visitor is in the latter stages of the buying cycle. Suppose you owned a search engine optimization company. Now suppose that you had these keywords to choose from:

seo
search engine optimiztion
seo strategies
seo services
seo company

     Consider the five keywords above and ask yourself which of these keywords indicate that the searcher is in the latter stages of the buying cycle. The first one, "seo" is so general that we have no idea why a person would search for that. They could simply be curious as to what the acronym stands for. They might want to know what seo is and so on. Same is true for the second keyword, "search engine optimization". The third keyword, "seo strategies" indicates that the searcher knows what seo is but they want to learn more about it. This is the research stage, which for eventual buyers, comes before the buying stage. Now consider the last two keywords, "seo services" and "seo company".  SEO services is the kind of keyword that indicates that people are, well, looking for seo services! Same goes for 'seo company'. No one is searching the internet for 'seo company' to pass the time and enjoy some light reading, quite obviously. Therefore, as the owner of an SEO company, we should be more interested in attracted visitors who already know what seo is, already know that they need this services and are now simply looking for a good seo company to provide these services. That is to say we are looking for visitors who are in the final stages of the buying cycle.

     This is important because it costs money to rank one's website for these keywords, potentially lots of money! Why waste money trying to rank for a keyword that will attract lots and lots of people who don't buy? Choosing Buying-Keywords is the "key" to success - and keeping your expenses down.

     5. Finally, we should all understand the competitive nature of the keywords we choose. In other words we should ask how long it will take to achieve a page one ranking for a given keyword. This will help you divide your keywords into a few groups. Some of them will be rather easy to achieve a top ranking for. Others will take much more time and money. It's best to start with the low hanging fruit so you, the business owner, can start getting some ROI from your SEO campaign.

     How do we know which keywords are easy to rank for and which ones are very difficult? Generally, the longer the keyword phrase the easier it is to rank for. Example: "SEO" is a very difficult keyword to rank for. It's a single word and the first page of Google is completely occupied by longstanding, authoritative, internationally recognized websites like Wikipedia, Google and articles by Forbes. That's pretty tough. But "SEO consultant massachusetts" is much easier to rank for because there are less people fighting for that keyword.

     Knowing these five points about keywords will save you lots of money and time in your seo efforts. It will keep you from overspending, spending money where you don't need to (non-targeted keywords) and will help you orient yourself should you hire an SEO consultant or SEO company.

Christopher Lees is an SEO consultant from Massachusetts. Post your comments or questions below.