Website Marketing, Wellington - Globe

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Researching Keyword Phrases

The other day a client asked me "Should I use keyword phrases that relate to the areas I work in or should I relate them to the things I do?" The question was in relation to writing good copy (text) for the website. Unfortunately there is no easy answer with respect to using keyword phrases that relate to the areas you work in, verses the things that you do. It really does depend on your target market(s) and the keyword phrases they use when look for suppliers of the products and services you offer.

The use of keyword phrases in your website's copy is critical to maximising the website's visibility on the Internet. When researching and selecting a suitable phrase you should try to be a specific as possible, selecting a keyword phrase that is popular as a search terms but not that popular that there are millions of pages competing for your prospects. Consider, for example, the term 'coach'. Key that into Google, select NZ pages only and then Google Search. You will see that there are over 1 million pages using the term. Bus companies, career coaches, life coaches, Coach Trail Lodge, business coach, sports coach. The list seems endless.

Over a million pages! It will be difficult to obtain a top 30 ranking. Bearing in mind that after the first 3 pages (i.e. the top 30 pages or sites) most people will have found what they want or given up. So, we need to narrow our search selecting a more closely defined term. Lets try 'business coach'. That's better. We've chopped the number of competing pages down by two thirds to around 315,000. Even so there are still a lot of pages.

Let's see if we can narrow it down further. Let's try 'business coach, wellington' - after all coaching is a fairly individual service. O'dear, things have become worse. There are now 858,000 competing pages.

But wait a minute. We are not trying to compete against every site that just happens to have the words 'business, coach, wellington' somewhere on a web page. We have decided that our target market is (likely to) be using the keyword phrase 'business coach wellington' (with or without a comma after coach - it does not matter). So lets key this phrase in as a phrase. To do this we use inverted commas: "business coach wellington". BANG! We are down to one! We are competing against one web page that contain the keyword phrase "business coach wellington"*.

Now it's a high-risk strategy to rely on one keyword phrase on a web page. So lets try another similar term say "business mentoring wellington" after all the target market may not be particularly aware that there is a difference between coaching and mentoring. There are no pages listed! So, is this a possible keyword phrase? If I were in the business of business coaching and business mentoring based in Wellington, I'd think I'd hit Nevada.

Mind you, just because a web page contains the keyword phrase you have decided upon, it does not follow that this is keyword phrase that prospects are actually using. For that, you need specialist tools.

* Since this article was written there has been a small increase in the number of firms using this phrase.