How to Choose Your Google Keywords
How to Choose Your Google Keywords
By Christopher Black
Imagine you have finished building your website and you have a product that you know the world will be interested in. You can try a whole range of offline advertising such as posters, local advertising, press releases and word of mouth but sooner or later you’ll need to tackle your online marketing strategy and get yourself a decent position in a search engine.
According to a recent report in the Guardian newspaper, Google has almost a 90% share of the search engine market. With this in mind a top 10 position in Google for your chosen keywords could potentially generate a massive number of visitors to your website.
By far and away the most important thing to do before you embark on your search engine optimisation (SEO) journey is to identify the keywords or key-phrase that you want to target. In other words, what search phrase do you want to bring up your site? A very common mistake site owners make is to invest time, effort and money in keywords that nobody searches for.
I will give you an example of what I mean using an online business that I own. My company’s website offers courier services - if you want to send a parcel from your home to your grand mother than you will probably think of DHL, Parcelforce, UPS or some other well known courier firm. What you can do instead of visit my site, enter your parcel’s weight and dimensions and then the clever software on my site scans the market to find the cheapest price for all the couriers and then shows you the best deal - you can then enter your grand mother’s postal address, pay online and then the courier from the appropriate firm will turn up the next day and collect your parcel.
A challenge for me was to identify the best keywords to target so that my site appears in Google. My initial ideas were “courier booking”, “cheap courier services” and “send a parcel”. What I was not sure about was whether these services were actually searched for.
The solution to the problem is to use a very clever tool offered by Google themselves. Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and then enter your key phrases in the large box at the top and click “get keyword ideas”. After a couple of seconds you will see the valuable information you need but first, in the drop down menu that appears in the top right corner of your results select “exact” rather than the “broad” match type - this will show you the number of searches for the exact key phrases that you have specified. Using my example above you’ll see that the “courier booking” gets an average of 260 searches a month, “cheap courier services” gets 390 and “send a parcel” gets a more impressive 2,900.
This tool lets you try other search phrases. After a bit of trial an error I came across “parcel delivery” - do a search for this and you’ll see that the average search volume for this key phrase is 22,200! So, rather than investing my time in tying to get to position one in Google for “send a parcel” I’ll be trying my luck on “parcel delivery” instead.
Good luck in your SEO journey and I hope you find this article and the Google keyword tool useful.
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