Express Marketing Memo

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Keyword research is a form of marketing research, with the goal of learning what terms your prospects use to find your product, service or small business online. But that’s just the beginning. Keyword research will also show you the amount of competition for each keyword you’re targeting.

Your keyword research goal is to find the terms with the highest search activity and the least competition.

“Long tail” search terms are three to four words long and very specific. For instance, the term “pricing baseball cards” is very specific. It has a Google keyword effectiveness index of 878 according to Wordtracker, meaning it has very high search activity and little competition. Remove “pricing” from the term though, and you’re left with a poorly performing term with a keyword effectiveness index of only .05.

Effective Keyword Phrases for Marketing your Small Business

Optimizing for a highly effective keyword phrase can land your Web page near or at the top of the search listing. Settling for a poor performer with either low search activity, high competition or both, may well land your Web page at the very bottom of the search results.

Photo Credit: Bird Watching by squacco on Flickr. (Creative Commons)

Related Articles:

Long Tail Search Strategy Works for Search Conference
Choosing the Right Keywords for Your Demographic
If Content is King, How Powerful is Your Web Site Copy?
Effective Results Driven Web Sites

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Jennifer Osborne at Search Engine People wrote an interesting post about the importance of understanding how your target audience searches. She describes how a 40-year old is not only going to be searching for a different product than a 17-year old, she may also perform any keyword search quite differently.

For instance: If you’re looking for a hair cut, do you look up “beauty salon” in the phone book or type “hair cut [city name]” into Google?

The 40-year old has spent her lifetime looking things up by category. The 17-year old has never had to do so. It makes a difference.

You can read Jennifer’s article, here: Dude, I’m Phaaaaaat!

How do you search? Do you tend to categorize or jump straight to an advanced keyword search to find what you’re looking for?

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This week has flown by! Here it is, Friday already and time for another small business marketing link round-up. I’ve found that on some days, everything catches my interest and I stockpile links in my Google Notebook. Other days … not so much. This week has been about half and half, probably due to a very full schedule.

Today we’re going to focus on a short list of links about search engine optimization because a web site that can’t be found on Google is just about invisible.

Ruud Hein wrote an excellent, easy-to-grasp explanation of how search really works, complete with images on the Search Engine People blog.

Small Business SEM offered an insightful post called “the SEO Success Pyramid.” He reminds us that search engine optimization isn’t just about the rankings, but rather the process of making great web sites that earn traffic and convert visitors into customers.

On December 3rd, Rick Spence of Financial Post asked the question, “At your business, is the Internet an opportunity or a liability?” Read his story about a small video production company so successful promoting their own web site, that they were asked to provide search engine optimization for customer sites. Their three part formula to rank well on Google includes inbound links from trusted sites, making sure that Google can read your content by not burying it in Flash and graphics, and identifying the right keywords for your business.

I’ve mentioned Wordtracker as an excellent keyword research tool in previous posts. Check out their “Using Keywords Primer,” specifically this article on generating search engine friendly content.

That’s it for today. Is your web site or blog search engine optimized? Do you have an SEO tip you’d like to share? Or a question?

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