2015 Website SEO Guide for Businesses (2015)

Google Keyword Planner

You can use the Google Keyword Planner to get more in depth information on keywords.

In your favourite web browser go to https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner

If you don’t already have a Google Adwords Account, you can click on the top right hand corner of the page and “Create an account”

Otherwise, click on “Sign in”

After you are signed in, you will have four options.

We’re going to choose the second option which is “Get search volume for a list of keywords or group them into ad groups”

Let’s enter in some keywords, you can enter keywords of your choice relating to your own business, or you can enter in the demonstration keywords that I provide below. Make sure to include quotation marks for each keyword. This is a better way to assess a keywords popularity as you can find out how many people are searching every month for your selected keywords.

“wedding flowers online”

“wholesale flowers online”

“flowers online”

“flowers by post”

Let’s narrow down the Target Audience a little bit. Select the following countries to target.

Canada, United Kingdom & United States

Now click on the “Get search volume” button at the bottom.

When the search is finished, which only takes a few seconds, you will see the “Average Monthly Searches” for each keyword.

The keyword “flowers by post” gets over 27,000 searches per month.

Up until now, your flower business has probably been focusing on the keyword “flowers online”, but now you know that “flowers by post” is also getting a huge amount of traffic, you can also focus on that.

For the keyword “flowers by post”, you will want to write about the different locations that you deliver flowers by post to, that may be local, national or international locations.

This gives you a really good idea of what keywords you should be focusing on.

The keyword “wedding flowers online” gets over 2,500 searches per month, so that would definitely be worth focusing on.

To get immediate results for these keywords, you would create a Pay Per Click campaign using Google Adwords or even advertise on some Social Media Networks.

Keyword research should be an ongoing part of your overall Digital Marketing Plan, and it should be used for SEO purposes and is also crucial for Pay Per Click when deciding what keywords you should be spending money on.

Give people what they are searching for and they will go to your website.

Remember, PPC is almost instant, SEO is long term, but both need to be used for successful results.

It doesn’t matter what products you sell, or what services you provide, keyword research is essential and ongoing. You need to make the time to do this or else you need to hire someone to do it for you.

You don’t have to guess at what your potential customers are searching for, with a little digging around you can find it quite easily.

Of course there is software you can buy that promises to make keyword research easier for you, personally I stay away from these. I have used them in the past, with little to no success. They are often confusing and difficult to navigate and the owners of such software are always after you to upgrade for more features. I find these features can often lead me in wrong direction and I end up wasting time focusing on keywords that users aren’t even actively searching for.

I find it best to start off with about 10 – 20 relevant keywords and move on from there. Don’t waste your time with free third party keyword planners, they offer nothing that you can’t find for free using the Google Search Engine or the Google Keyword Planner.

Usually, the longer the keyword, the less competition and the easier it is to rank organically for these keywords.

When I start a campaign with a new client, I use PPC for the short tail keywords, three words or less and SEO for long tail keywords, which are more than three words and can be up to 10 keywords for certain products or services.

Of course, short tail keywords are always a long term goal for SEO and should also be used.

If a certain keyword generates 10,000 impressions per month, of which you get 200 visitors to your website in that month and six of those visitors buy your product or service and each one spends £100, then that keyword is worth £600 per month to your business.

You will find out more as your business grows which keywords are driving sales.

Your website should already be linked up to Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. These are two places where you can find out which keywords are bringing in visitors to your website and which pages of your website these visitors are going to.

Ignore keyword research at your peril as it is one of the best research tools for you business that you can ever hope to find.