Using keywords to connect with your cusomters
When you understand your ideal customer or client it’s really easy to use keywords to connect with them. For the unintiated in the world of internet marketing, most people think of keywords as single words. While this can be the case, for beginner’s the best place to start is key phrases or what’s also known as “longtail keywords”.
In fact the way that I learned about this kind of thing was when I started building a website for the karate school that I run with my wife Sandra. When we chose the name for our business, we stumbled across some great longtail keywords, but more about that in a little while.
At first I thought wouldn’t it be great if we could be found when someone typed “karate” in the search bar in their web browser. The problem with this “karate” is a short tail keyword, meaning that it is short, non descript and not very targeted. The other problem is that there are also 24,900,000 results on google which makes it quite a competitive search term and brings up results for people all over the world.
But I want to connect with people in my local area. This is where I add a bit more detail, I know that the people I want to attract live in the Sunshine Coast region, and given the the name that we chose for our dojo is “Sunshine Coast Karate” this is enough to build a geo-targeted, longtail keyword. Google returns 37,200 results which is certainly much smaller than the global results that the search term “karate” returns. But for our purposes, it helps us connect with our market.
In most cases, this is enough for us as it captures the interest of new students every month. But we could go further and by looking at the types of people that we want to attract. One of our market segments is children, so we could use an even longer and more targeted search phrase such as “sunshine coast karate kids classes”. Or from time to time we run school holiday programs for children, so we could get even more targeted with something like “sunshine coast karate school holiday programs for kids”.
There are a lot of ways to figure out what might be good keywords for your business, but a good place to start is to do a search and see what it takes to find one of your competitors. Once you’ve chosen a keyword that you want to use, the next step is to make sure that your key words are visible on your webpage, blog post, article, or link back to your website.
In the 2004 US presidential election a group of internet marketers manipulated the search results for the term “miserable failure” by creating lots of links back to George Bush’s website with the words “miserable failure” as the anchor text for the links. As a result, George Bush’s website became the #1 listing in Google’s search results for that search term even though the words “miserable failure” did not even appear on his website. As a result Google had to rewrite their search algorithm to fix this “problem”. Anchor text is still important for links that point to your website, but there is also a lot that you can do on your own website.
Without getting into too much detail, here are a few things that you can do with your onsite SEO (search engine optimisation). If you just do the basics, you’ll be doing more than 95% of webmasters, even I get a bit lazy from time to time. Here’s a short list of what you should do on your site with your primary keyword(s):
- It should appear in the page title
- It should appear in the page meta description
- It sould appear in the meta keyword list
- It should appear in the <h1></h1> HTML tag
- It should appear throughout the page at a density of 3-7%
- Additionally, you can also wrap your keywords in a <strong></strong> HTML tag throughout your page, also known as bold
As I said most webmasters are too lazy to do all of this on every webpage that they create, but if you’re serious about building traffic to your website, don’t underestimate the power of taking these steps.
As an additional note, I use this keyword density checker from time to time when I really want to target a specific keyword.