Choose the Right Keywords, the Right Message the Right Marketing Channel

Lately I’ve been talking about keywords a lot and this is because I really think that keywords are the starting point of a search optimization process for a website. The way you choose your keywords might determine the success of your business.

If you’re not getting any business or the right clients it may be because you are targeting the wrong keywords, or you are transmitting the wrong message or you are using the wrong marketing channels. As a person that offers SEO services I’ll concentrate on the importance of finding the right keywords to target in your content.

If you look in your analytics and see a high bounce rate for pages that are getting decent amount of traffic it might be because you are not talking to the right people. So if you are having high bounce rates for referring traffic it might be because the websites you are marketing on are not that suited for your business. The same way, if you have high bounce rates for traffic that comes from search engines it might be because you targeted the wrong keywords.

The fact that you receive traffic it’s a good thing because mainly you’ve done your optimization right, even thou for the wrong keywords. I think that the main mistake when it comes to selecting keywords is thinking at your business in terms of what services do you offer.

The more technical and specific a service is the less it will be searched by interested clients on the web. Sure that for some common businesses targeting the exact service name would make sense because people know what that service means. But when it comes to services/products that are not that used or they’re new you should take a different approach.

My suggestion is to think about the problems your service/product addresses. Nobody will get up in the morning thinking of hiring an SEO. But when he/she will see that the traffic is going down or the rankings are going down they might go on the Internet and search for solutions to their problem. Maybe they don’t know it’s called SEO but they know they have a “traffic problem” or “ranking problem”.

It’s just a simple example about how important the keywords are and the fact that people are searching the web for solutions to their problems. Identifying the problem usually means solving the puzzle.  Another good thing to keep in mind is to also optimize for searches related to your location. If you are located in a big city then these terms would be highly searched every month. If not, it doesn’t hurt to be prepared for any business opportunity.

It’s important to include the location near the keywords you are targeting because when people search for something in relation to a location they usually want to pay for those services/products. As a conclusion, when you are building your keyword list write down the problems that you resolve with your business and then go search for relevant keywords.

What do you think about all this? How did you choose your keywords? How do you determine the relevancy to your business of the keywords you pick?