A basic understanding of how keyword marketing can affect your search engine results.
Ranking high in search results is as much art as it is science. Refining your online content to be effective for search results as well as the human reader is a difficult and often challenging endeavor. Let’s say you want to be ranked as the number #1 inbound marketing agency in Sarasota, you would have to find out what your competition is doing, where they are ranking and focus on developing an online marketing strategy to make sure that when people search for Sarasota inbound marketing agencies they find your company instead of your competitors.
Develop A Targeted Keyword Strategy
Google and other search engines send out web crawlers to comb your content and index everything you put online so when someone types in a specific keyword Google can be sure to deliver the most accurate search results possible. When Google indexes your site they are looking for specific keywords that indicate what the content is all about. When I talk about inbound marketing in Sarasota, I am targeting a specific keyword and more importantly a long tail keyword as opposed to a short keyword. The search engines then use this information to cross reference search query’s against indexed pages and determine whether or not my site is a relevant match for what the searcher is looking for.
Because of this it is important to develop your online content around specific keywords that are based on what people search when they look for a product similar to what your company sells. In order to determine what these keywords should be you need to be sure that you are thinking like a customer and not like someone who works in your industry. You need to be sure that the keywords you target are not full of industry jargon and psycho babble that no one would ever type in to a search field. Your keyword marketing efforts should be simple and based on what the average person would type in to find your company online.
How to pick your keywords
In order to select relevant keywords for your local inbound marketing efforts you need to start thinking like a buyer as opposed to a seller. You need to put yourself in to the buyers mind and think like they think. Ask yourself these questions when trying to determine your keyword strategy.
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Who am I? What am I like?
You are looking to establish a specific buyer persona for the product or service you are selling.
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What am I looking for?
What specifically is the person looking for when they search for the products you sell?
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What problems do I have that your company solves?
What is your value proposition and how can you make sure that the person searching for you finds you when they use a search engine.
After you have an understanding of the specific keywords to target you need to know how difficult it is to rank for each of those keywords. You can use a tool like Google AdWords or HubSpots Keyword tracking tool to help you find out more about ranking difficulty and search frequency for each specific keyword.
By understanding the difficulty for each specific keyword you can focus your online marketing efforts in places where you might actually see results. It would make no sense for a local small business in Sarasota to try and compete against a national player. You just don’t have the overall web authority, traffic or content to be a real competitor. Instead you could focus on local long tail keywords to help you increase your search results and then grow from there.
Getting to the top of Google search results is not something that happens over night. It is something that you have to focus on and spend a considerable amount of time working on in order to see tangible results. It is even more important that you have someone who knows what they are doing behind the wheel of your online marketing efforts or it could end up being just another failed small business marketing strategy.
Find out how Inbound Marketing can take your Search Engine Optimization to the next level.
Tags: Search engine optimization, SEO, inbound marketing, marketing, Communicating, google, iinbound marketing, increase exposure
