Search Engine Marketing: Keyword Search Is Often The Last Thing Web Owners Think About Spending Money On - Marketing - Marketing Tips

Nobody today would question that having a website is an essential marketing tool for any business today whether you're a start-up, local or national brand business. Yet many website are developed without any conducting a keyword search on their online market. Whilst website managers believe it is important to pay for a professional site with a great design, clear navigation and quality content many can't tell you what keywords they are trying to rank for and why. This is similar to spending money on advertising channels and not understanding who you're targeting - unthinkable in traditional marketing! Yet this is still common practice for many web managers.

If any of this sounds familiar then it is time to acknowledge that your site likely to be underperforming and even if you're currently paying out for search engine optimisation services such as link building you could be wasting your money. It pays to get help from a search marketing agency to establish your online market as this is likely to be more niche than your offline market. A page 1 ranking on the search results in Google is very competitive for most keywords and phrases. It's difficult to get a page 1 ranking without a lot of back links and online activity, and this takes time and an SEO budget. Here are six basic questions about keyword search you need to ask yourself when identifying keywords for online marketing.

1. Do you know the keywords potential customers type in when searching for your products and services?2. How many exact searches do these keywords achieve in a month? It is important not to confuse the number of broad searches for a keyword with the exact searches as they broad searches can be much higher and misleading.3. You need a sufficiently high number of searches per month to generate traffic to your website. Even a website with a top page 1 ranking will only receive 40-60% of the potential clicks in a month and a number 10 ranking on page 1 results page will receive just 3% of the potential clicks.4. What is the competition for the keyword? In other words how many other websites are competing for the same keyword?5. What's the strength of the competition? This is more important than how much competition there is and depends on how well the websites are optimised for the keyword by a number of on page factors and off page factors. Off page factors will considers fac tors such as the number of back links to a specific page on the website and the number of back links to the domain. The age of the website, and the Cache Age of the website will also be considered. The cache age shows how many days it has been seen Google has indexed your website. The more your site is updated the more frequently Googlebot and the other search engine 'spiders' will reindex your website. There is also what is called 'on page optimisation' ratings. This takes into account search engine optimisation factors such as how well a page within your website is optimised for the keyword. Another SEO factor is whether the keyword has been used within the description tags on the page. All these need to be considered before you can determine the strength of the competition.6. You also need to consider the commercial intention of a keyword. There is little point in spending your money of keywords which are words people type in when researching for a product and services.Ke yword search should not me an after thought but a careful part of online marketing and it pays to use a search engine marketing company to help you identify your keywords and online market before paying for search engine optimisation services.