Getting Discovered on Google #1: Keyword Research

Keyword Research:

What keywords and how they can benefit your business?

Ever wondered why you’ve typed in “Victoria” a state in Australia and you encountered an image of a Victoria Secrets Model, a photo of Victoria Beckham, or even a Victoria in Canada?

Google isn’t as smart as a human yet and subsequently needs help understanding what a specific website is actually about. As an individual, you weren’t even thinking about the three other popular Victoria’s but they are all featured predominately in the search engines. That’s why keyword research needs to be conducted thoroughly before launching your website.

That’s perfect proof of how important keywords are and how difficult a job it is for search engines to understand the various nuances and complexity of the English Language.

Is a Keyword just one word?

I find this area really is where people stumble. Regardless of whether the search is for an individual word or a phrase they are still classified as keywords. A keyword can be a single word like the brand “Explainafide” or a long string such as “Explainafide web design”. Keywords can even be quite extensive such as “Who’s the best creative web designer in the Melbourne region?”

Most of the time however people actually search using disjointed phrases like “website design creative”. There are so many different permutations, phrases, and misspellings that it is quite a science to get right.

The idea of Keyword research is to discover what words people actually use when searching for an item. Often it is not what you think, often it is misspelled, and almost always not real sentences.

Is Keyword Research that important?

There are so many different websites out there competing for readers’ attention that it is getting more and more difficult to get discovered. If you try and aim for commonly used keywords such as “Web Designer” you are going to struggle to get any attention from Google. You are probably better off concentrating on long-tail keywords, location-based keywords, or specialist niche keywords.

Aiming to use keywords like “Web Designer Bendigo” will get people in your area finding you rather than aiming for pie-in-the-sky “Web Designer” keywords. A far greater number of people are going to search for “Web Designer” but the competition will be far greater and just as importantly the quality of the people coming to you will be specific to your region using a location-based keyword.

As you can see in the last two keyword examples computers still don’t pick up that ‘web design Melbourne and ‘Melbourne web design’ is the same thing. Humans can pick the difference without even thinking yet Google still needs to improve in this area.

Planning is the key to any successful web design and keyword research is just one aspect that is vital before any website design is undertaken.

This is just a small introduction to Keyword research and basic SEO for your small business, art business, or start-up. we’ll be adding more fresh tips & ideas to the blog every few days so make sure you subscribe or follow us on Twitter.