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Your Ranking in Google -
Key Phrase Research
Ask Susan - Tip of the Month
March 2005
How do you improve the rankings of your website in Google?
I have a sure way to do that: just ASK-SUSAN:
I
will be teaching this, and more, at a Continuing Education
Course "Increase Website Leads & Sales"
#22597 at Central
Oregon Community College in Redmond, Oregon April
21st and 28th 2005 from 1:00-4:30. I hope that you will be
attending.
Last month we looked at Study your competitor's
websites to expand the list of key phrase ideas.
This month we'll refine that list of key phrases to identify
those that are going to help you make money. This Key
phrase research is important because you can be #1 in
Google, but if no one is searching for that phrase, you
won't get any visitors.
You will be spending time and effort to optimize your
website for the selected key phrases so it is important
to pick the ones that will attract new customers.
What is a Key Phrase?
What is a Key Phrase and why is it important? A key phrase
is a set of words that a potential customer types into
the search engines (such as Yahoo and Google) when looking
for your services or products. A poor key phrase is one
that few people type into search engines or one that is
used on so many other websites that you have no chance
of being listed on the first page of the search engines.
A good key phrase is one that a lot of potential customers
use and where you can achieve a first page ranking. Such
a key phrase will bring a lot of visitors to your Web
site, visitors who are looking for what you have to offer
and are likely to become customers. Sound good?
Your key phrases must:
1) Accurately describe your services or products so that
visitors attracted to your website will be interested
in buying 2) Be specific because these terms usually have
less competition then general terms and they attract more
qualified visitors
3) Be popular - phrases for which people are searching.
You know how to describe what you offer. Do you know how
your potential customers describe what you offer, what
words they use when they are looking? Those are the words
and phrases you need: theirs, not yours. Ask your current
customers. How else do you know what phrases people are
typing into search engines? There are some great tools.
WordTracker
and Overture's
Keyword Suggestion Tool are two of them.
Expand your list:
First use the Overture's
Keyword Suggestion Tool to expand the list of
potential key phrase ideas. This tool also shows the number
of searches actually conducted last month using those
key phrases.
Then use WordTracker's "simple search" to expand
that list. You can use WordTracker for one day for only
$8.09.
Determine number of competing websites
Enter this complete list into the "exact search"
in WordTracker to show how many competing websites there
are in the Google. You can verify number of competing
sites by typing your potential key phrases directly into
Google. You will see "Results 1 - 50 of about 22,600,000
for used cars" (or something like that).
Find the best key phrases
Let's look at an example that I did for a company that
builds car washes. WordTracker showed that for "car
wash equipment" there were 294 searches per day and
1.3 million competing websites in Google. I use the "count"
provided by WordTracker as the approximate number of searches
a day on the Web. You can read the fine print for all
the details, but that's the way it works out.
I compared this to "carwash equipment" which
has only 58 searches a day and 185,000 competing websites.
To get a good ranking in Google we have a much better
chance if we focus on "carwash equipment" than
we do "car wash equipment" because there is
so much less competition. In addition we know that there
are still plenty of searches.
This is the start of developing a list of the best key
phrases.
Try it with your list of key phrases, you may be surprised
what you learn.
In April we'll look at easy ways to get links to your
website. This will help your rankings and bring in visitors
that are likely to become customers.
Best Regards, Susan Hankins
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