One of the biggest challenges for defining keywords is defining words that are actually searched for in the various search engines. Whether you are working on the content of your website, optimizing your profile on LinkedIn or generating Social Media content. Your keywords need to be relevant to your product or service and more importantly, actually searched for by potential customers.
First we need to have a paradigm shift in our thinking when defining keywords. We need to look at your keywords from the perspective of your audience. Many times we are too close to the subject and frequently define keywords that are what we want to be found by. All to often, these words are far from what our potential customers actually use to search for us.
Talk to your friends and family outside of your business, ask them what words or phrases they would use to describe your products or services. As you talk with them compile a list and look for commonality in what they are saying. You might even use tally marks to keep track of each mention of a word or phrase allowing you to see the hottest words.
Now that we have done a market study, we need to validate our findings. In other words, in the real world search results, how often are our keywords being searched? Google has a great tool to allow us to see just this.
Google has a lot of great tools for making your website much more effective as a marketing tool for your business. And the best part is that they are free. Using Google AdWords which you can access at adwords.google.com. Once logged into your account, select the Opportunities tab, then on the left you will see a link for Keyword Tool. (NOTE: These links may change, if you need help finding this, let me know)
In the top left corner of the Keyword Tool you can enter your keywords. Enter your words and see what the results are, did the results show hundreds or millions of hits? Look at the other results in the list and see if there are higher volume keywords that could increase your exposure.
While in the Keyword Tool, you can also have it scan a specific page on your site and show you results that in and by itself may be quite revealing.
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