Get found with inbound! What’s the first thing you do (most of the time anyway) when you are thinking of making a purchase of some sort?
Chances are that you either sat at your computer or have a mobile or portable device to hand and so do the ‘Google’ thing (other search engines are available y'know). Today, most purchases (business and domestic) begin with a search online – for information – reviews, specifications, prices, availability, pictures... zzz!
Here are the things you should be able to answer:
- How can you make sure that your business is found when someone is looking for the type of product or service that you supply?
- How do they find you and not your competitor?
- How do you improve your ranking with the search engines, for as many relevant terms as possible?
We believe that the first step in ‘searchability’ (or ranking) for the most common terms that your buyer personas are seeking is by identifying and using the best possible keywords as part of your online communications and content.
What is a keyword and how do you ‘pick’ one (or more)?
To do this, you have to think like your customer... (which is a good point of view to be able to tap into anyway if you’re in business).
Put yourself in the shoes of each of your buyer personas and tell me –
- What are they typing into Google when they are searching online for a business like yours?
- What are the ‘key’ three to five words?
- Think, think, think and draw up a list.
Now you’re ready for the next stage...
Using FREE online tools
These FREE online tools are gems - such as Overture Keyword Tool and Keyword Discovery - which you can use for your already-created list, to identify related search terms plus, the number of times users are searching for them!
Hint! You can use Google’s Keyword Tool too but it works slightly differently – it will give you a low to high rating rather than search numbers. On the plus side, it lets you plumb in your site, or a competitor’s, and will identify the keywords that are related to it – great if you are still struggling for somewhere to start in generating your list of keywords).
A handy ‘top tip’ here is to cut and paste your results into a spreadsheet Two to three key terms ought to produce a list of about 200 to 300 rows of spreadsheet data. Using this information that you have collated you can now analyse the content to make decisions about which terms are the best ones for your activities to centre around.
SCORE STEP 1: How relevant is each term to your business?
Insert a column and rate each term with your own grade for ‘relevance’ from low to high (we suggest between 1 and 5).
TIP: It may help here to slip back into your ‘buyer persona’ mode and rate it according to how likely someone using this term is to convert from a visit to your website into an actual sale.
SCORE STEP 2: Number of searches.
Add another column (we suggest you label it ‘volume’). Use the sorting function in Excel to sort from largest search volume to least. Now you can use the ‘volume’ column that you created to score them – if you have 300 terms, give the top 60 a rating of 5, the next 60 a rating of 4 and so on.
SCORE STEP 3: Identify the ‘best’ keywords.
Now you can analyse the data to identify which terms not only get a high volume of searches but are also very relevant to your business. You need to create one more column – ‘total score’ – where you make it equal to the sum of twice the relevance score plus the volume score.
Total score = (relevance x 2) = (volume)
Now that you have this final ‘magic’ number you can use the sort function to give you a list in descending order of the terms that have the highest combination of search volume and relevance. This immediately shows you what to concentrate on and use for better impact.
Using the data you have gathered, pick your ‘keywords’ and implement them – use them on your website. Build them into your page titles, URLs, meta data as well as in text on the page itself.
