Take a look at any business forum and you’ll see that many small business owners struggle to attract visitors to their company website. Imagine if you could get inside the mind of your customer and know exactly what words they use when searching for the products or services you offer? Having such insider information can put you miles ahead of your competitors and can help you get those elusive website visitors.

Finding those keywords is not as difficult as you might think, and doing keyword research is absolutely essential in ensuring the online success of your business. Think about it for a minute; if you don’t know what terms your customers use when searching for what you offer, then anything you do to win their attention is just a best guess. Let’s face it, guessing in business is never going to make you successful.

Keyword Research

There are two ways of conducting keyword research: either employ the services of an SEO company or use the Google Adwords ‘Keyword Planner’. The former will provide you with very in-depth information and the latter will result in a more basic list of the most obvious keywords. The advantage of using an SEO company is that they will interpret the results for you, and advise which keywords to use to bring you faster, shorter term results.

What are you supposed to do with these golden nuggets of information once you have them?  When you are writing about your products or services you use your keyword list to write pages which will attract more visitors. Let’s consider an e-commerce site which sells wedding gifts. How do I know if people will be searching for ‘bridal gifts’, ‘wedding gifts’ or ‘wedding presents’? I remember that any guess work is not going to make my website successful, so I refer to list of keywords which has been created just for my e-commerce site. I can see the following:

• ‘Wedding gifts’ attracts 49,500 exact match searches in the UK every month
• ‘Bridal gift’ attracts 2,400 exact match searches in the UK every month
• ‘Wedding presents’ attracts 6,600 exact match searches in the UK every month

I can now instantly see that if I use the term ‘wedding gifts’ when writing my pages that that this will potentially attract a lot more website visitors than if I use the term ‘bridal gifts’. Keyword research also uncovers a lot of terms which you would never have thought of on your own, and will also indicate how competitive each search term is.

Use Keywords So That Customers Can Find You

As you can now see, if you research and find words that attract website visitors then you’re also pinpointing words that help to sell your products or services.  Keyword research is essential and often completely overlooked in terms of online marketing efforts. Bear in mind that if you’re on a budget and can’t afford to have keyword research done for you, ANY research you do yourself using the Keyword Planner is far better than doing no research at all. You might even find out that there’s no market for what you’re offering and as such you can change track before you’ve made too much of an investment in your new business. However keyword research mostly provides you with a huge competitive edge and can put you in the shoes of your customers to ‘intuitively’ know what they want and allow you to respond to that need at just the right moment: when they are searching to find what you offer.