How To Help Google Find You – Part 1

How to choose your Most Wanted Keywords and phrases (MWK’s)

Chances are if you’re not sure what words and phrases people are using in the search engines to find your kind of product or service, you won’t be using them on your site.

If you don’t use those specific words and phrases on your site, Google won’t think you’re relevant for them and there is very little chance that you will be rewarded with a sought after free listing which is displayed on the left hand side of a Google results page when someone searches on that word or phrase.

So how do you choose your Most Wanted Keywords or phrases (MWK’s) for your business?

Every day, millions of consumers use Google to find a solution to their problems.  Google knows exactly what we’re searching for and magnanimously (?!) shares that information with us in the form of the Google Keyword Selection Tool.

Use it well and this resource will help you discover what words and phrases people are using in the search engines to find your products or services, how much competition there is for those phrases and even how much it is likely to cost to advertise.

Let’s say you have a landscape gardening business.

Google helps us find out which words and phrases people are searching with to find garden designers.

Fire up the tool by clicking here:  https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Enter all the possible words and phrases that you think someone with a weed ridden garden might search for.  Some examples could include:

• Garden design
• Gardener
• Gardener surrey
• Landscape gardener
• Landscape gardener surrey
• Garden design surrey

Etc etc.  Include variations of the phrases, geographic locations if you want a local business and plurals.  When you’ve exhausted every possible variation you can think of, enter them into the Word or phrase box, with one on each line.

Type in the characters you see in the captcha code box (this ‘weeds’ out the spammers) and hit search.

Now before you get too excited, stop and click on the box which says Exact Match on the left hand side, this puts all your words into [brackets] and only shows you the results for people searching on those exact phrases.

Next sort your results by clicking on the ‘Local Monthly Searches’ column.  This will show the keywords and phrases with the highest number of searches in your area first (edit your location using the ‘Locations’ link further up the page if it is not showing your country.)

The bar chart shows that the competition for all these phrases is fairly high (hover your mouse over the competition bar).

If you want to find out how much it would cost to advertise your garden design business on Google, then sign in to your Google account before starting your research and a new column with average cost per click charges will appear.

By narrowing your search down geographically ie Garden Design Surrey, your numbers reduce dramatically but the relevance of that search for you increases too, especially if your business is going to be specific to a certain area as Garden Design would be.

Remember that small, local businesses do not need huge numbers searching for them on Google, a few can keep you very busy indeed, but the larger the search numbers and lower the competition the easier it will be to gain traction and visibility in that market.

You also need to think about the commercial value of each phrase.  You might be excited to see in the suggestions that Google helpfully provides below (which will help you expand your research and comes up with ideas you might not have thought of) that the word ‘Garden’ has 33,000 people searching for it in the UK each month with only medium levels of competition!  But is this word being typed in by people who need someone to design their outside space?  Unlikely!  This kind of term is too vague to target, we want phrases that indicate that someone is looking for something to buy and is ready to make a booking or place an order.

Of course the numbers that Google gives us need to be taken as indicators of need rather than a hard and fast calculation of the number of customers we are likely to get.  There are many more factors at play here; once you’ve found your niche you need your site to appear on page 1 of the search results (no mean feat!), your description needs to entice someone to click on your listing and then your site needs to convert that browser into a buyer.

But once you know the main keyword or phrase that most of your potential customers use to find products and services like yours then you can focus your site content on those specifically and start working your way up the rankings to page one.

Once you’re on page one, your business listing will be seen by your hottest prospects exactly when they are looking for a solution to a problem that you can provide, and better yet, when they click on your listing it will cost you nothing!  Well worth the effort involved in getting there.

Your Marketing Goal for the week

Research the exact keywords or phrases that most people are using to find your product of service using the Google Keyword Selection Tool.

Choose a maximum of three which have the most searches and lowest competition – these are your Most Wanted Key Phrases.

Now write them down on a sticky note or blu tack them to the wall.

Goal Complete.

From now on, whenever you write new content for your website, blog, social media accounts, articles, PR and advertising, include these phrases naturally in your writing.  Over time Google will come to find that your content is entirely relevant to that word or phrase and subject to a few other factors will start to feature links to it whenever someone types them into the Google search box.

Tip:  Don’t overuse your keywords in your writing, always remember you’re writing for humans not just search engines!

NB: If you’ve already done this,  it might be time to do it again!  People’s search queries change over time and depending on seasonality and trends.  Top up keyword research  is worth doing every 2-3 months.

Next Week:

How To Help Google Find You – Part 2

I’ll be talking about the second most important thing you HAVE to do if you want to appear on page 1 of Google for your Most Wanted Key Phrases.