Keywords have been the dominant feature of all my research into online marketing recently. It occurred to me that they are the number one driver that connects businesses to customers or audiences. This has huge implications for the creation of web content because keywords need to be at the very centre of it.
There are four main ways that a web user will find a website. People may arrive at it directly if they know the web address. Or they may be referred from another website that has a direct link. Then there’s paid search, which are search results from advertising. And finally there’s organic search. Over 90% of adults use search on the internet and thus it is the dominant director of traffic on the web.
Search operates through the use of keywords. Keywords are the words people use to search the internet to find what they need. These can be just one word, but more often, they’re phrases or groups of words, that describe the product, service or piece of information being searched for. A neat definition I heard recently was “Keywords are the summation of people’s thoughts into actions on the keyboard.”*
The search process is very familiar to anyone that’s surfed the net. It goes like this: a person enters a keyword that describes what they’re looking for into a search engine such as Google or Bing. The part that most people aren’t familiar with is that the keyword is taken back to the search engine’s database, where there is practically a complete backup of the internet. Then, through some finely tuned programming, the database will serve back what it considers the most relevant matches of that keyword to the pages it found on the internet. These are displayed in what the search engine considers the descending order of relevance. That relevance is based, in large part, on the match of the keyword to keywords on the web page served.
If the person sees a link that is relevant, they will click it and be taken to a landing page. That landing page will contain all or part of the keyword phrase entered by the searcher.
This has major implications for any business that relies on online marketing. For its website to be found, there needs be the same or similar keywords on its designated landing page that the searcher entered into the query. Keywords must therefore be a primary focus for strategising, content creation and any verbal messaging. The approach relies on a customer-centric form of communication and taking as wide a birth as possible from company lingo and formal nomenclature.
The keywords people use when conducting online searches was a topic I found most compelling. In taking a customer-centric view to keywords, it behoves us to find the most popular. A free tool found at google.com/trends lets you determine the frequency of keyword use. For example, ‘used’ is used much more than ‘pre-owned’ when it comes to car sales. Similarly, (at the time of writing this) ‘kids’ is more popular than ‘children’. If there’s a match between your intended audience and the more popular keywords, then they are certainly worthy of closer examination.
The keyword planning process begins with the company strategic plan. The company objectives are determined and then consideration is given to how online marketing can assist in meeting those objectives. A critical part of the planning is identifying the prospective customers or audiences. The marketer needs to visualise them, describe them, know them. Why? Because it is vital to be aware of the language they use to reach out for your product, service or message. Following this comes the keyword research. There are many online keyword research tools to gather popular keywords. This process will involve looking at what keywords the company’s competitors are using to reach customers.
The keywords the marketer discovers then become the cornerstone of content creation. To increase the likelihood that the designated landing page will appear high in the online search results, one main focus keyword is selected. It will become king! It should be used in the article title, throughout the article and page title (and a number of other places not visible to the site visitor such as meta data) . If Google AdWords are part of the campaign strategy, then this focus keyword will feature highly there as well. The search engines will reward the company for this effort.
As a manager of web development the plea I hear most often from business owners is that they want their website to appear at the top of the search results. Whilst keywords aren’t the only factor in achieving this outcome, they certainly are a dominant player. As I’ve been studying the field of analytics and Google AdWords very intensively over the past two months, the importance of keywords has surged to the forefront of my thinking. Without keyword research and planning, a business is just not going to be as competitive or efficient in reaching its intended prospects or audiences.
My closing remarks on this are that if you’re a content creator, web developer, marketer or even business owner, start to learn about keywords. But in doing so, ensure you have some clarity around your business objectives and what part your website will play in meeting them. And please don’t overlook identifying your audiences. Get to know them and the keywords they’re most likely to use. This will give you the framework for your keyword research and planning and ensure that all the effort and resources you put into creating that beautiful website and brilliant copy will get seen and heard.