Market research
You have to understand the needs and wants of your customers before you can target them effectively.
Keyword research
‘Keyword research’ tells you how your prospective customers are using the Internet search engines to find out about your products and services. Once you understand about their searching, you will quickly discover your online competitors, too. These are the businesses who present themselves most effectively to your target audience.
Effective keyword research will be the basis of your online marketing strategy. Relevant keyword phrases will help to rank your site in the search engines. When customers find those keywords in your page, they know they are in the right place.
If you target the wrong keywords, then either your web site will not be seen at all, or it will attract people who will never buy your goods or services. Marketing to them is a waste of time, money and resources. You must use keywords that attract the right audience – the people who are likely to buy from you.
The Wordtracker tool, which offers a free trial, will help you with keyword
options:
Wordtracker: www.wordtracker.com
Overture’s Keyword Assistant is another useful tool:
UK: www.content.overture.com/d/UKm/adcenter/tools/index.jhtml
International/USA: www.content.overture.com/d/USm/adcenter/tools/index.jhtml
Aim to target two or three keyword phrases per page. For each of these, two or three word phrases are better than a single keyword. For example, if you offer holidays in Greece, the competition would be too great if you simply used the keyword ‘holidays’. You need to define the kind of holiday in your keyword phrase.
Use different keyword phrases, title tags and meta descriptions written in the HTML of your web pages for each of the important pages of your web site, to attract a broader range of searchers. If you use the same search phrase in a number of your pages, you will be wasting some of them. Search engines normally only show a maximum of two of your web pages in the results for any one search query.
