All small business owners need to understand Search Engine Optimisation. Whether you are an online business owner or run a bricks and mortar business, by now you know the importance of a strong online presence to grow your business in 2017 and into the future.
The last few years have seen a huge upturn in the amount of digital marketing guru’s, online marketing experts, SEO scientists and many other new and exciting sounding titles but many of these titles mean very little.
As a business owner it is your responsibility to be at the very forefront of your online marketing efforts and that all starts with knowing the keywords that your target audience are searching for.
Let’s start by breaking our keyword research down into two different categories, informational keywords and commercial keywords.
Informational keywords are the search phrases people use when they want to know something, for example: best places to build a house near Pattaya, best places to buy land near Pattaya, best types of windows for Thai houses.
Commercial keywords are the search phrases people use when they are ready to commit or buy: buy land in Pattaya, builder in Pattaya, European kitchen fitters Pattaya.
Commercial keywords are your pot of gold, if you can rank for commercial keywords and get your website in front of consumers eyes at a time when they are ready to commit then you have a very good chance of making that sale.
However, all of your competitors are also trying to rank for those keywords, and they may have a bigger, better website, a higher online marketing budget and/or a stronger online reputation.
This will make it difficult for any new business to rank well for high competition commercial keywords and could take any length of time up to 2 years to gain a high page one ranking for competitive keyphrases?
Does this mean you shouldn’t try to improve your search engine rankings? Not at all…you just have to be creative!
Informational keywords can be found everywhere, first of all type into Google anything that you think your target audience may search for on Google which is related to your product.
Don’t press enter and just see the keyword suggestions which Google gives you, these are usually highly searched terms which can become part of your content marketing strategy which we will discuss over the coming months.
Another great way to find informational keywords is using tools such as Quora and Udemy to see question and course titles which people are publishing, eg: ‘How to build a tiny house’ and ‘What’s the best way to build a house?’
Informational keywords are a great way to start building traffic to your website, however you need to realise that this method of SEO is not going to bring a fast return but it will bring you slow and steady results over a period of time.
Next month we will look at more ways in which to do keyword research for both informational and commercial keywords.
