Digital Marketing – don’t your eyes just glaze over when you hear the term? The sheer number of acronyms (SEO, PPC, CPM, CTR… ARGH) mean that it is often easier just to nod and smile when someone is in full Digital Marketing Passion mode. However, I promise you that lurking deep within the jargon and dry statistics are some rather useful (and simple!) hints, tips and tricks that can make your business far more visible online to a real audience of potential customers.
You don’t need the marketing budget of a multi-national corporation to compete with the big boys online. We’ve assessed over a hundred business websites over the last 6 months, from small local businesses to internationally recognisable brands, and 99% of them have one thing in common – they haven’t got the basics right when it comes to Digital Marketing. Yes, they may have a full in-house team dedicated to Digital Marketing, but they aren’t effectively targeting their customers in the organic Search Engine Results Pages (the non-paid for Search Results), and that often has a detrimental effect on all of their other Digital Marketing activities.
So what have they done wrong? The majority of these businesses haven’t taken the time to carry out comprehensive keyword research to determine what exactly buying customers type into the Search Engines when they are looking for a particular product or service that their business offers. In addition, businesses aren’t optimising their pages and website appropriately, often meaning that though they may have spent thousands on an ‘all-singing, all-dancing’ website, that it just isn’t visible online to the people they want to see it.
So how do you start trying to find keywords that will drive relevant traffic to your website? Here are my 4 top tips for finding the right keywords:
1.) Use a keyword planner tool – like Google Keyword Planner (https://adwords.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner/ ), Wordstream (https://www.wordstream.com/keywords ) or KeywordTool (http://keywordtool.io/ ) to investigate how people might search for your business.
2.) Consider using less jargon – unless the majority of your customers work within the same industry as you and have a similar technical knowledge, the use of jargon isn’t recommended! However, it’s always worth typing certain ‘jargon’ terms into a keyword planner tool to find out whether anyone actually searches for it!
3.) Don’t use the name of your Business as a keyword (unless you are a huge and well-known brand like ‘Coca Cola’, etc.). Ideally, you want people who don’t know your business name to find you too, so using a more descriptive keyword could help you achieve this.
4.) Don’t be too general – it may seem as though targeting a general search term with thousands of monthly searches would be a great idea, but you need to be more specific if you want relevant traffic to your website. Here’s an example:
Hotel – too broad**. People could be looking for a hotel in Australia or the Arctic Circle!
Hotel UK – Still too broad, as people could be looking for a hotel in Scotland, Ireland, Wales or England.
Hotel Buckinghamshire – Better! But Buckinghamshire is still quite a large county, so this is still too general (unless you are providing a county-wide service).
Hotel Aylesbury – Good! People are looking for a bed and breakfast in your specific town. This is ideal.
Hotel Walton Road – Too specific, the majority of people won’t know the road names of your local town
**N.B. if you are offering a digital or UK-wide service, you can be more general with your keywords, though consider that there may be more competition on a national scale for these broader search terms.
Good luck with your keyword research! Just to warn you that, on average, we trawl through over 80,000 potential keywords for a specific business and/or industry when we are carry out keyword research in-house, so don’t panic if there’s a lot of potential search terms coming up! Just take your time and shortlist those that are most relevant to your business and the kind of things that real ‘buying’ customers would search for if they were looking for you online. Happy Keyword Hunting!
Who are we?
Digital Marketing Implementation Services specialise in the foundations of Digital Marketing – Keyword Research, On-Page and Website Optimisation, and Link Building – and have recently launched a 4-month guided learning course designed to help small businesses gain the practical skills necessary to carry out their own successful Website Marketing work, either for their own website or for a customer.
The course involves a one-to-one 5-hour induction and overview session carried out via video call, and then the course material is delivered on a weekly basis via email (with videos). We offer email and telephone assistance throughout the course, and we also will carry out extensive keyword research for you, and check your work at every stage. To help VAs ‘elevate’ their own website, we’re offering a special offer of £600 off the £2000 full course fee to those attending EleVAte this October. You can find out more about the course here: https://emarketing-strategy.co.uk/online-digital-marketing-course/ – or feel free to email me on gemma@emarketing-strategy.co.uk quoting your ticket number for more information.