MOJO MEDIA LABS IS NOW GRAVITY GLOBALLearn how the Acquisition of Mojo Media Labs by Gravity Global Impacts Your Growth Strategy Click Here to Read More
May 7, 2012 •Mojo Media Labs
If you wanted to boil internet marketing down to a single starting point, keywords are it.
What is a Keyword?
A keyword is a word or phrase that a person enters into a search engine like Google and Bing or a social media site like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
Why Build a Keyword Strategy?
More and more consumers are finding businesses online through search engines. How do they find them? By using keywords! Fortunately, you can take advantage of this consumer habit by optimizing your website around the keywords that are relevant to your business and which keywords consumers are using to find you online. This will increase your chances of getting found by people searching with those keywords, which will drive more and better quality traffic to your business’ website.
While it’s difficult to know exactly which keywords will get the most relevant people to find your business, there are ways to determine the popularity and competitiveness of certain keywords. You can also test and analyze how effective different keywords are in drawing visitors to your site.
As a business professional, you should make sure the right people are finding your business online. In this section, you will learn how to define which keywords will maximize your potential to draw in relevant traffic from search engines.
Keyword research is an ongoing process that should be followed closely. It gives valuable insight in terms of industry trends and product demand. Comprehensive keyword research can help a business grow its organic traffic and save you from spending money on pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns such as Google AdWords.
How to Create a Keyword Strategy
- Create a list of 3-5 keywords relevant to your business. Think like you’re using the brain of someone searching for your product with a search engine. For small- and medium-sized businesses, your keywords are not your brand name. Instead, think of words and short phrases that get to the core of what your product or service is about.
- Choose keywords based on difficulty and relevance. The keywords you choose should be based on difficulty and relevance. Some very general words such as “marketing” or “business” are very competitive, making it harder to rank well for them in search engine results. If you are a small- or medium-sized business, you probably want to choose less competitive keywords, more specifically related to your business (these are commonly referred to as long tail keywords). The greater the volume of searches on a keyword, the more competitive it is. There are a number of different tools you can use to determine the competitiveness of a specific keyword as well as suggest and help you brainstorm new keyword ideas. These tools include the Google Keyword Tool or HubSpot’s Suggest Keywords feature in its software’s Keyword Grader Tool.
Another important factor for picking keywords is their relevance to your business. While some obscure terms might be easy to rank for, they might not be relevant to your business. You should find a balance between relevance and difficulty. Choose about 5 keywords that match your business well. Note that these keywords do not have to be perfect at first. You can try out different ones to see which work best for you.
- Design and optimize your website around your keywords.
