It has been a manic summer so far with companies doing all they can to promote themselves within the search engines and vying for every scrap of business that’s available. Having the opportunity to compete over price is now seen as a luxury; it’s being found in the market that is now seen as the biggest challenge.

Search engines feed on keywords; these are the phrases that users type in when they are looking for a websites, services, products or specific pieces of content. It is important that you do your research to understand what keywords or phrases are being used by your potential visitors and customers. To research these statistics there are a number of keyword tools that are available to use, some free and some usually via a subscription.

Fighting over the competitive keywords to increase the level of traffic is a priority for many business owners. From our perspective, we cannot stress enough how important it is to do your keyword research and we don’t mean do it once and think that the jobs done! Markets change, companies change, people change in the way they search, therefore so should your keywords.

Keywords should be considered as the platform for your online strategy and should be used throughout your website and all online marketing collateral.

When researching your keywords, don’t put all of your eggs into the most popular keywords. Whilst it may be true that they are important for your business, they may also be the most competitive and therefore will take a more sustained approach to build good ranking. Consider your locality, your products and your service.

Ideally you are looking for keywords that generate good levels of traffic i.e. highly searched for, however are relatively low in their competitiveness i.e. the amount of times they appear as keywords in other websites.  These Keywords are calculated using a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) out of 10 and the higher the KPI the better.

As we have already mentioned in other areas of this blog that research shows that people do use multiple keywords rather than just one. Categorising your keywords into groups often helps structure your approach, taking the generic word and creating more targeted phrases from them, for example Restaurant > Italian Restaurant > Italian Restaurant in Newbury

As a strategy, decide upon your primary keywords and choose a number of secondary keywords for each page.  Ideally you’ll have 10-20 highly focused keywords for your home page, and approximately 2-3 secondary keywords for each sub page. This may equate to approximately 20 secondary keywords in total.  Be careful not to have too many as this can dilute the importance and effectiveness of each page and therefore have a negative impact.

Have faith in your keywords and use them in all your online marketing collateral. Use them in the titles, heading, meta descriptions, Alt texts and anchor texts i.e. links within the content itself. This will help the search engines understand what your content is about and provide you with a greater opportunity to move up the search rankings when your keywords are being searched.

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