One factor that affects search ranking are the words (or ‘keywords’) you use in your content. Anytime you publish information about your business to the web (whether it be a blog, website, or business listing), it’s wise to include keywords that your potential customers will be searching for. If you neglect to include a keyword, then people searching for that word probably won’t find you.
Doing keyword research
Google has a great tool that takes a lot of the guesswork out of keyword research. It’s called the google keyword tool https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
The keyword tool will estimate the amount of traffic for any keyword you enter, and will also suggest additional related keywords you might not have thought of.
To use the keyword tool, visit it here.
You’ll see something like this:
Enter a keyword you think is associated with your product or service into the box labeled ‘Word or Phrase’, and click search. You’ll be given the number of monthly google searches for that keyword, along with a list of ‘related keywords’.
For example, when I enter ‘massage’, google estimates there are 7,480,000 monthly searches related to ‘massage’ every month.
7,480,000 seems like a lot of monthly searches, and it is! Keep in mind that this includes the entire United States. The number of searches for ‘massage’ in a given city will be considerably smaller (for example, there are only about 27,000 monthly searches related to massage in Seattle). Even so, the monthly search estimates are useful because you can use them to compare the relative value of one keyword versus another.
Google reports two numbers, global monthly searches, and local monthly searches. Local monthly searches only includes searches made by users within the US, whereas global monthly searches includes all searches on Google.
There are a few interesting finds in the related keywords… It looks like people frequently search for ‘deep tissue massage’, ‘shiatsu massage’, ‘swedish massage’ and ‘sports massage’ just to name a few. If I were a massage therapist in seattle who practiced any of the types of massage in that suggested list, I’d want to be sure to mention it!
Here’s a simple process for researching keywords:
1. Make a list of all the keywords you think people use when looking for your business.
2. Go through your list, entering each keyword into Google’s keyword tool, checking the suggested keywords for searches you hadn’t thought of. Repeat the process with any new keywords Google uncovers.
That’s all there is to it!
A word of warning
One common mistake is stuffing content with every imaginable keyword to the point where it’s no longer useful to readers. This is a mistake. Modern search engines like Google are good at detecting jumbled keywords, and typically penalize ‘keyword stuffing’. Plus, any potential customer who stumbles across your content is likely to be turned off by a jumble of words.
Focus on writing clear descriptions, and be clever about how you work in important keywords.
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