The Profitshere

Any good SEO will tell you that content is king.

And that is absolutely true. You need to base your website on great content.

But what do you base your great content on?

KEYWORDS.

Keywords are what your customers are typing into the Google search box when they are looking to buy your products or services.

And you should know that not all keywords are created equal.

Some keywords will bring you alot of traffic, but not many sales.

Some keywords will bring you sales but not much traffic.

And some keywords are just too plain competitive to worry about, unless you have got a bottomless budget.

The Foundation of Great Keywords

There are a number of factors that you should consider when you think about selecting the keywords to base your content and website around.

1. Search Volume – if there is no search volume then there is no point. That said, alot of web searches involve long tail keywords (4 to 10 word search phrases). However if you target the three and four word search terms with good traffic volume you will find that you pick up long tail searches as a result.

I often use the Google Search Keyword Tool to get a measure of search volume for a group of keywords. I also use a commercial software program called Market Samurai which measures search volume and other important keyword benchmarks.

2. Commercial Intent – is your traffic going to buy? Are you bringing a bunch of tyre kickers to your website, or are people coming to buy? It is important that your keywords will bring you traffic, and it is vital that your visitors have some intention of buying something.

Microsoft have a very useful tool for measuring Online Commercial Intention.

One of the other ways that you can get a measure of commercial intention is to type your keywords into Google. Now look at the right hand side of the page to see how many Google Adwords ads there are. If there are no ads then the commercial value of the search term will be low. If there are at least a page of ads then the search term has a much higher commercial value. (or there are alot of mugs that are buying ads and not making any money.!!)

3. Competition. The final factor I take into account when I assess a group of keywords is the competitiveness of each phrase. You can do a quick assessment of this by typing each term into Google and seeing how many results are returned. Are you competing with a few thousand websites or are you competing with millions of websites.

You can then use a tool like Site Explorer to examine the top ranking websites for your search terms to see how strong the competition is.

The 3 Factors that determine Great Keywords

So, the three basic factors that I measure to determine what keywords to target are Search Volume, Commercial Intent and Competition.

From there, you can then make a decision about what keywords you are going to base your great content around.

In October 2008, Netcraft indicated that there were over 182 million websites on the internet. Given how quickly the internet has grown in the last 18 months, I can only imagine that that number has grown significantly.

So, as a website owner what does that mean to you? My thought is that it means a lot of competition. Hence the growth in niche marketing.

So you have a website and now you need to find a way to get people to it. I remember talking to a client a few months ago and he sais ‘I have this great looking website, but nobody is finding it.’ You can have the best looking website in the world, but if it doesn’t get any visitors the chances of it being profitable are ZERO.

So, how can you get traffic to your website?

When I work with clients there are 4 ways I look to build traffic to their sites -

1. SEO – Search Engine Optimisation. In a nutshell this basically involves trying to get your website on the first page of Google and even to the Number One position. How hard this will be depends on your competition. The results will be governed by how big your market is (i.e. how many searches), and the quality of this traffic.

Alot of businesses and internet marketers spend alot of their time trying to get on the front page of Google, and I would certainly never discourage that. However Google can be a fickle mistress and depending on the quality of your work you might find yourself in the penthouse one day and the outhouse the next.

My only advice is ‘Don’t put all your eggs into this basket.’

2. YouTube – this can give you a double whammy. Create a quality video and put it on YouTube and you will bring visitors to your site. A ‘How To’ video or a promotional video can bring targetted traffic to your website. The other great thing about this is that your video might rank better in the search engines than your website. Google loves YouTube and you will see video results returned in most internet searches.

3. Social Media – Twitter, FaceBook, BeBo, Myspace etc etc.  Done in the correct way you can build a community around your business and bring people to your website without the help of Google. You can use Social Media as a way to build a list of followers for your business and products. Just remember it is called Social Media and not S.PAM media.

4. Paid Traffic – if you are having trouble getting free traffic, then maybe you can look at paying for traffic. If you have a profitable business model then this is just an advertising expense. This may involve banner advertising, adwords, text ads or other paid advertising. My advice to you here is that you should target your advertising to maximise your return on investment. Where do your potential customers hang out when they are on the internet?

If you are using paid advertising make sure that you can accurately track the return on each branch of your advertising. You must know how many visitors and sales are being generated from each form of paid advertising. Test and optimise is the best strategy for paid advertising.

So, how many of these avenues are you using to drive traffic to your website?

ONE?

Two?

THREE?

If you are using all four, congratulations.

If not, how many potential sales are you missing out on?