Most people use a keyword suggestion tool when they try to find new keywords for their campaigns. While keyword suggestion tools are good, they should not be the first step in your keyword research activities.

Before you use a keyword suggestion tool, ask yourself the following questions:

1. What problems can your product or your service solve?
2. Which questions do potential customers ask?
3. Can you offer unusual solutions?
4. Which products and services do you offer?

As you can see, the products and services that you offer are the least important. A person with a headache might not know that the Shiatsu that you offer will help them. They even might now know what Shiatsu is and if they know it, they might not be able to spell it properly. The same applies to all other services and industries.

For that reason, it is important that you focus on the first three points before using your products or services in the keywords.

1. What problems can your product or service solve?

In this example, the problem that your product or service can solve is a headache. Create a list of words that describe the problem:

headache, racking headache, migraine, vicious headache, splitting headache, megrim, constant headache, etc.

2. Which questions do potential customers ask?

People type different things in Google’s search box when they try to find a solution to their problem. Here are some real queries that have been done on Google:

• why does my head hurt
• why does my head hurt when I cough
• how to get rid of migraines without medication
• how to get rid of migraines when pregnant
• why can’t i concentrate on anything
• why am i so tired
• etc.

The problem that your product solves creates certain circumstances (fatigue, temper, concentration problems). Address these circumstances in your keyword phrases.

The problem can also be connected to another factor (for example migraine and pregnancy). Create keyword phrases that are related to these factors.

3. Can you offer unusual solutions?

Most people will take a pill when they have a headache. In this example, you offer a solution that many people don’t know about (Shiatsu). The following phrases would work for you:

• get rid of migraines without medication
• get rid of headache without pills

The unusual solutions that you offer can also be used in your AdWords ad copy and on your web pages. For example, you might create web pages around the following topics:

• How to get rid of headaches without using Aspirin
• An unusual way of healing migraine without medication
• etc.

4. Which products or services do you offer?

Of course, you should also use the names of the products and services that you offer in your ads and SEO campaigns. In this example, this would be:

shiatsu, shiatsu massage, etc.

When you try to find new keywords, tell a short story that describes the problem and the solution: “A person has a racking headache. The person cannot concentrate because of that headache and the person is tired. Instead of taking a pill, there can be other solutions. That solution is my Shiatsu service.”

By doing this, you’ll find many keywords around which you can create new web pages and PPC ads. Of course, you can also combine this method with keyword suggestion tools.

Copyright by Axandra.com. Web site promotion software

Hi Marshall and Gary here,

Here at Small Business Internet Marketing, we often see the claim “we will get your website to rank number one in Google“. This is, in itself, an admirable desire and can get significant visibility for a small business. However, it is an often abused claim from marketers as the mere ranking at number one in Google just means you have caught the eye of the spider for the searched words; it does not mean huge amounts of business will roll in through the internet.

The missing parts of this online marketing equation are:

• How many people are searching for the keyword
• How relevant is the keyword to your business

Obviously the greater the number searching, the better. And the more relevant the keyword to your business, the better. But any claim on keywords and Google rankings without reference to these 2 key metrics is ultimately meaningless from a business perspective.

Let’s look at some examples of what we mean.

Small Business Internet Marketing ranks number one in Google Australian page searches for “commercial keywords”. This, by the way, is not by design. When we analyse this keyword, we see that only 4 searches are done a day that include “commercial keywords” so we never have tried to optimise for it. However, we do rank number 2 for “small business internet marketing” which is something we are optimised for and has considerably more searches each day.

We do find that some people mistake the available results returned by Google as highlighted here as the number of searchers for the keyword. Let make it clear that this is merely every page indexed by Google that has “commercial” and/or “keywords” in it, plus anything else that Goggle believes is relevant. You often see the mischievous claim like “…out of 538,000 searches on Google, we rank number one…” with the implicit suggestion that this site somehow will get a huge amount of traffic. No, no, no, no, no! It is not searches, it is results returned by Google.

Another site that we have seen says it ranks number one for “male run business support” – which we do not doubt. Unfortunately, our research shows that this keyword has absolutely no searches for it. The fact that Google returns some 86,000,000 results is not relevant, the fact that no-one is searching for it is highly relevant. As a keyword, it has low commercial relevance (OCI of 36%).

It is also worth considering what is a reasonable volume of searches for keywords. For someone pursuing an affiliate marketing strategy through using pay per click Adwords, volume is the key. The greater the volume, the more absolute conversions into sales (provided the optimisation is effective). On the other hand, we have done work for small consulting businesses specialising in a niche market. In this case, a search volume in Australia of 2 per day is more than acceptable if you only want to have 10 clients.

So let’s state for the record what is relevant for a keyword strategy:

1. They must have reasonable search volumes (relative to the business)
2. They must be relevant to the business (an aquarium shop optimised for “business suits” is not a great strategy); and if both these are met
3. A high Google ranking for your site on the keyword

Your business buddies
Marshall and Gary

Hi Marshall and Gary here,

Here at Small Business Internet Marketing, we love using free tools and software to help small businesses, their owners and advisors as well. Well here is a great tool that is provided free by Microsoft (yes, Microsoft!). It is not new (been around since 2007) but we find most business owners and advisors are not aware of it.

We know that businesses need to determine what keywords and phrases they should be targeting to get visibility in their online marketing via SEO, but the inevitable question is “Is the searcher using these words or phrases because they are looking to buy or are they just seeking information?” If it is the latter, why bother trying to optimise for this (which is a question worthy of its own post- more to come). Well Microsoft has a free tool that is designed to try to address this issue.

It is called “Online Commercial Intention” and can be found at what Microsoft call their “adlab” site at: http://adlab.microsoft.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/Default.aspx.  We will use “OCI” for ease of reference (plus that is what everyone online calls it).

When you go to the Microsoft site, you will see a screen that looks like this (well part of it anyway).

We have typed in “paintbrush” as the keyword we want to find out what the OCI is as an example. When you use this tool, make sure you set the button to Query rather than URL (because we are querying what the keyword is, not the site name – but use this URL function if you are thinking of different options for your website). Then hit Go.

So what it shows here is that searches for the word “paintbrush” are likely to be non-commercial in OCI as it shows, and pretty strongly non-commercial (0.76 or 76% likelihood). This stands up to rational logic test we like to apply at Small Business Internet Marketing - the searcher is likely to want to find something out about paintbrushes, not to buy them.

Well let’s try to make it commercial and see what we get:

You will see we added the word “sale” to “paintbrush”. Obviously adding “sale” clearly makes it commercial in intent – the searcher is looking for a sale so therefore they are likely buyers. The result shows an overwhelming OCI of 99%. So it passes the rational logic test here.

So far so good.

The obvious question is how reliable or predictive is the Microsoft OCI. Well, that is for you to form your own opinion. We have certainly found that it keeps passing the rational logic test. The best strategy is to plug in some keywords that relate to your business and see what the result is – by and large you should have a gut feel as to whether it is right or wrong.

Microsoft has done testing in the outcomes from the algorithm that they use in calculating the OCI against real people views. If you want to see a summary of the study, go to the Learn More hyperlink at the bottom of the left hand side of the Microsoft adlab site. Basically, their results show around 90% correlation between the algorithm and real people. Sounds good – but it is not the only secret to online marketing success.

Good luck with using OCI – it really is a useful guide to a searcher’s intention. We will talk about OCI more in future posts from Small Business Internet Marketing.

Your business buddies
Marshall and Gary

Hi, Marshall and Gary here,

Before we jump in and start developing a keyword list for a small business, we need to understand some of the associated keyword terminology.

We commonly refer to basic or top level keywords. This simply means the ones you have selected first are the obvious ones that relate directly to the description of the product or service you offer. For example, if you were in the Golf market, you would have a basic or top level list that would include golf, golfing and golfers. These are also an example of what’s referred to as single keywords.

Short tail keywords represent the next level. These contain two words. For example, golf course, golfing tuition and golfers guide.

Now long tail keywords (or keyword phrases) are those that usually contain 3 or more connected keywords. For example golf course design, golfing tuition videos, golfers guide to putting. Long tail keywords are generally more descriptive and are more targeted to specific market niche.

Related keywords are those that broaden the range of market sectors that you can target. For example, again using golf, related keywords may include, sport, outdoor activities, hobbies and recreation.

You may hear a reference to deep keywords. These are simply those that drill down deep into a particular niche market. For example golf can be drilled down into men’s golf and ladies golf, left handed men’s golf, right handed men’s golf, left handed ladies golf, right handed ladies golf, right handed men’s golf driving, right handed men’s golf putting, etc etc. We think you get the idea.

A negative keyword is also an important concept to understand. An example of this would be words like free, cheap, second hand, near new and bargain. Even though these words when combined with your basic (top level) or long tail keywords may attract a healthy search volume, you generally don’t want to have them related to your product or service.

So now that you are armed with the basic terminology it is time to develop your basic or top level keyword list. The starting point is simply to identify the broader market that you serve. For example if you were a dental surgeon you would start with, dentist, dentistry and dental. These are good examples of single keywords.  The next level down is short tail keywords that could include, dental surgery, paediatric dentistry, dental surgeon and family dentist.

In the next post we will look at how to expand your keyword list to include long tail and keyword phrases and look at how to go broad and deep.

Your business buddies
Marshall and Gary

We wish you all the best of luck in applying this tool in your endeavours to secure more BSP clients and also extend your current BSPs and introducing them to the world of small business internet marketing. If you found this Google keyword tool helpful, or you’d simply like to share your successes and war stories in its application, we’d love to hear from you, so please, we encourage you to leave a comment below.

We also invite you to subscribe to our RSS feed (top right hand side of the screen) so you can get all the updated posts that cover tips and tricks, the latest trends and all the happenings from the world of blogging from Small Business Internet Marketing. Best of luck and if you have any questions or comments please feel free to contact Gary or Marshall. To all those associates that attended the IIB National Conference in Brisbane on the 10th February, we hope you enjoyed this event. There has been an overwhelming response to the Google keywords tool presentation and a number of IIB associates have requested a copy of the demonstration video. Well, here’s the link to YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hCbfu0HNTg

Hi, Marshall and Gary here.

Carrying on from Part 1,

If the name of your business is “Hinkler Roasted Peanut and Green Grape Farm” and you have a website www.hinklerroastedpeanutandgreengrapefarm.com that had only minimal optimisation for that keyword phrase, you would be almost guaranteed of the #1 search engine result. Why? Because your keyword phrase is unique as there is unlikely to be another business with the same name. In addition, one of the many search engine algorithms works on matching exactly the keyword or phrase entered. There may be millions of sites that have been indexed by the search engines that contain the individual keywords, but very few, if any than just your site, that have these keywords appear in that order.

Now if we have a look at this keyword phrase we will see that it is made up of individual keywords that could be searched independently. Even though you may rank highly for the entire phrase, where do you rank for the individual keywords and more specifically, what is your ranking for the keywords of the products that you sell? i.e. roasted peanut, green grape?

And finally, how many people are searching for your keyword phrase. It is highly unlikely that anyone would be keying in your entire keyword phrase unless they already knew the name of your business or they were specifically looking for your small business blog or website. People searching for the type of products offered by your business would be searching for roasted peanut or green grapes. I can guarantee you one thing, no one is searching for your keyword phrase.

So what does this tell us? Well, it’s simple, it is not that hard to rank highly for a particular keyword or keyword phrase depending on how unique the word (for example what the hell is a Google before Google created their business?), or the unique nature of your keyword phrase, but uniqueness isn’t going to ensure you visitor or search engine traffic. In short your blog or website needs to rank highly enough for keywords that your customers are actually searching for and not what you hope or think they are searching for.

In our next post in the Understanding Keywords category we will have a look at how to develop an appropriate keyword list for your small business‘ products and services.

If you don’t want to miss any of this Understanding Keywords series, be notified of all the new posts by subscribing to our RSS feed at the top right hand side of this page.

And while you are at it don’t forget to leave a comment on each post and let us know if you are enjoying our observations or if you’ve got any helpful suggestions, questions or issues you’d like us to address.

Next post – what is a search engine?

Your business buddies

Marshall and Gary

Hi, Marshall and Gary here

One of the most common questions we encounter is “what keywords should I use?” Well…. the answer obviously depends on a range of variables such as what market are you in, what are your key products or services, who is your market, where is your market located…. and the list goes on.

Keyword research and the use of keywords has developed and matured over recent years. In the early days keyword research was a tool used to feed up all sorts of trickery to deceive the search engines. Those days are well behind us and the complexity and sophistication of the search engine algorithms ensures that engaging in tricky is only going to end in heartache whilst sticking to the rules and working hard on developing a keyword list and then optimising your blog or website correctly for these keywords will pay dividends.

Through the use of keyword tools, there is no excuse for not understanding the language of your customers. The secret to online success is to tap into that language and start to enter the conversations of your prospects and customers so you can develop, promote and deliver a highly targeted product or service.

Successful internet marketing requires a vigilant approach to the research of your keywords. The battle for the consumer dollar starts and ends here. If you have not spent the time to understand what your prospects or customers are searching for, regardless of how great your blog or website looks, or how it performs…. you’re simply not going to get enough traffic to your site to ensure its success.

The importance of keywords today cannot be underestimated. Keywords and keyword phrases have developed into a form of currency by which official markets have been established to enable you to bid on the use of keywords in online advertising campaigns and purchase keyword rich domain names.

The value of keywords and keyword phrases can be seen on a daily basis in the search engine results. Internet statistics from around the world tell us that on average the number #1 ranked position on a search engine results page (SERP) can expect to receive 42% of the traffic generated by that keyword or phrase. Now depending on your market this could mean a steady trickle of visitors to your blog or website or it could mean a barrage of traffic that sends your servers into melt down.

To dominate the SERP results for particular keywords and phrases can (with a high degree of certainty) guarantee you some level of traffic to your blog or website, however it doesn’t mean that you will have a profitable site or convert any business from it.

Next post – true value of keywords (Part 2)

Your business buddies

Marshall and Gary