When it comes to marketing your business, there’s no better way than turning up in the top search results on Google. Since more and more people are using search engines rather than the phone book to locate business (even local businesses) you’d better make sure people can find you.
To get found, you need a plan to optimize your website so the search engines bring your website up first. This process is known as search engine optimization (SEO). Some of the basics of SEO include:
- Having search engine friendly URLs. For example: www.mywebsite.com/rosesforsale instead of www.mywebsite.com/index.php?forumid�%. Not only are these URLs more search engine friendly, they’re more people friendly.
- Using appropriate keywords in the friendly URLs, as well as in the header of your page and within the body copy.
- Getting incoming links, particularly from relevant websites. For example a florist would do better getting links from a wedding planner or interior designer than from a mechanic.
- Having a sitemap
However, if you are a small business competing against hundreds or thousands of other businesses worldwide who are all online, certain keywords are just always going to be out of reach for you. Not matter how good you get at SEO you just won’t be able to crack the top ten because the competition is so fierce.
This is where the long tail comes in. Chris Anderson in his book The Long Tail popularized this concept. Basically the idea is to ignore the main keywords in your industry and instead focus on keywords that don’t have quite as much traffic but also don’t have as much competition. Roses might be a main keyword but Mothers Day Roses Owen Sound is a long tail keyword.
If you can optimize your website for keywords that only have 3,000 searchers each month but you can get in the top three fairly quickly you’ll likely get more traffic than if you optimize for keywords that have 100,000 monthly searches but you show up as item number 30.
The trick however is to figure out which long tail keywords to use. This is where Google Keyword Tool comes in. Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and you can type in keywords you think customers might use when searching for your products and services. Google generates a list of keywords plus suggestions and shows you local and worldwide searches for that keyword in the previous month.
Not only that, but Google will generate suggested related keywords. You can download the entire list as a text file or Excel spreadsheet. You can then take a closer look at the keywords and their traffic. Pick ones you haven’t been optimizing for and add a blog post or page to your website that uses those keywords. Then make sure you’re using Google Analytics to track what happens to that particular page as compared to other pages on your site.
Here’s a video walking you through the process.
Andrea J. Stenberg
If you missed them before, you might want to read Search Engine Optimization: Increase Your Chance of Getting Found Locally or Five Reasons to Learn About SEO and Use it On Your Site.
