Keyword Research: Are You Speaking My Language?

Where's the Needle?

With the advent of search engines, it is now possible to show up when somebody is searching for what you sell. In addition, search terms reveal visitor intent. That is profound. By now, nearly everyone realizes the potential value of top positions in Google. Within internet marketing, an entire industry spawned to take advantage of this opportunity and has been labeled search engine optimization (seo). Such a broad spectrum has been further broken down into areas such as keyword research.

Are you speaking the language of your customers or are you using your industry lingo and terminology? For a very long time the airline industry was in love the with the phrase "low fares". The problem is that customers don't search for "low fares" (330 searches per day, WordTracker), they search for "cheap flights" (7,178 searches per day, WordTracker). If you target the wrong keyword phrases with your campaigns, you will either end up with little to no traffic or a bunch of traffic that never converts. Neither is a great place to be.

As a small business owner, you may be attempting to get better rankings in Google by doing gorilla raids yourself, outsourcing, or hiring an seo firm. How do you evaluate whether an seo campaign is successful? Is it top ranking in Google? Is it the volume of organic/natural traffic? Is it conversions? Hopefully you answered the latter because otherwise you are just wasting resources. Far too many seo's are still addicted to top rankings and traffic volume when they should be addicted to conversions.

If I am running an e-commerce site, I would much rather have 100 visitors per month with 5 sales than 10,000 visitors with 2 sales. If your monetization strategy is based around advertising, you would probably prefer the higher traffic volume. Now that you know the importance of speaking your customers' language, you probably will turn to keyword research tools. Naturally, you will be lured to all of the keyword phrases with the most traffic and will likely target those. It is human nature and as is often the case, it is not good for you.

Often these will be one and two word phrases such as folders or presentation folders. Not only will these require much more resources to rank well for, they will likely not convert as well. Your best bet will be to pick keywords with modifiers such as cheap 2 pocket folders or unique custom presentation folders as these will have far less competition and will likely convert better.

If you choose wisely, you will begin to get sales from the the low hanging fruit and can then put some of this money back into the process and eventually rank for some of the more competitive and higher volume keyword phrases. Typically 1-2 keywords equals information searching and 3-4+ keywords equals wallet out. Be sure that you pick keywords phrases that are relevant and targeted (key indicator is click through rate). Otherwise, you are just wasting time again. Stop that!

Did you know the following about Google? 50+% of all searches in a given month are unique. 50+% of all searches are 3 words or more. Generally, the longer the search term the better they convert. In addition, the tail really is bigger than the head (long tail of search) when you add up all of the search volume for these lesser terms. You cannot guess the keywords that will work and keyword research tools are not all that helpful with these one-off keyword phrases. You will need to install software such as Google Analytics to get some feedback from your efforts.

The beauty is that as you create more authority and more optimized pages, you will begin to rank and convert for keyword phrases you never thought of. These are like needles in a haystack, so don't go jamming them in your meta keywords tag for all your competitors to steal! Why make it so easy? However, the real competitive advantage is not knowing the keywords but what they mean to the customer. That is where all the money is because then you can create optimized landing pages that match the visitor's intent.

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