Keywords

Why do we need keyword research? Let’s look for the answer by looking at a typical scenario.

A company wants to market their product or service on a website and has realised the best way to achieve success (make a sale) is to have as many visitors as possible on the website, so that the chances of someone buying something increases.

So, where does keyword research come in? Let’s take a high level look at the keyword research process and we’ll see how the careful selection of a small number of keywords fits the scenario described above.

Keyword Selection

The overall target is to find keywords or keyword phrases that are regularly used in the search engines by potential customers who are looking for the product or service the website is promoting. Also, just to complicate thing, it is better to find keywords that do not have a lot of competition i.e. entering a keyword into the search engine doesn’t result in hundreds of websites competing for a place on the first page.

OK, we’ve got our keywords, what do we do now?

Once the keywords or keyword phrases are chosen the target page needs to be optimised to the keyword so that the page appears on the first page of results. This is done by ensuring the search engines believe that this page is one of the ten most relevant pages on the internet when the keyword is searched on.

Now we’re on the first page, we should get lots of visitors, right?

Not necessarily. When a search engines lists the ten most relevant websites, it includes a small section of text taken from the target website page. This text is basically an advertisement and is often the deciding factor in whether the visitor clicks on it or not.

We’re getting lots of visitors but no sales, why not?

Two potential explanations. The ‘wrong’ type visitors are ending up on the website because the keywords have not been selected properly, or the page layout doesn’t entice the visitors into buying. Either choose different keywords or change the page layout. This can be identified using techniques discussed in the Analytics section.

Summary

We’ve demonstrated why it is critical to the success of any website for the correct keywords to be used. It’s not just about the number of visitors; it’s the type of visitors.

Having the wrong type of visitor on the website can have a negative effect on being listed on the search engine result’s first page. The search engines monitor how long a visitor stays on a website and if they see visitors only stay a few seconds, they will deem the website as being not as relevant.