In my last post I talked about how important keywords are for your business.

By knowing which keywords are relevant to your business and what keywords your potential customers are searching for when trying to find the type of products or services you offer, helps you increase the chances of being found by the people who are searching for the things you sell. This means you get quality traffic to your website.

It is difficult to know exactly which keywords will get the most relevant people to your website but by determining the popularity and competitiveness of those keywords and testing and analyzing how effective the keywords are in drawing the visitors to your website, you can figure it out.

So the first thing to do is to make sure that the right people are finding your businesses online.

Unless you are a big company like Coca-Cola your business name is not going to be what people are searching for when looking for your services and products.

So…when you choosing keywords based on relevancy, for example; if someone wanted to start a web design business a good keyword would not be design.

1. It isn’t very relevant. Someone could be looking for car designs, boat designs, house designs, so chances of someone not becoming overwhelmed and redefining their search is pretty slim. About as slime as someone searching for designs who is actually looking for a web designer.
2. As a small to medium-size business we want a less competitive keyword. Something more specific and more related to our business. A lot of people refer to these as longtail keywords. People determine how competitive a keyword is by how the number of searches that are being done on that keyword every month.

There are a lot of tools online that can be used to determine how competitive a specific keyword is.

An important factor in picking a keyword is how relevant it is to your business. But ranking for a keyword that no one is searching for is also a waste of time because chances are it’s not going to driving traffic to your business.

It’s about finding a balance between being relevant and being difficult to rank for. To start with you need to find the best ten keywords that match your business, really well.

If you’re reading this blog, chances are you’re either a marketing professional or a business owner. 

And you understand that the traditional marketing methods no longer work. You also know that you cannot neglect your business and stop marketing. So you are either already making a living online and are wanting to learn more or you are considering starting a business and are looking into marketing in the most powerful and effective marketing network of our time, the internet.

It doesn’t matter whether your business is just getting started with Internet marketing or you just want to brush up on your basic skills, this website can help you in setting up and implementing a successful Internet marketing website design and marketing plan.

From establishing your keyword strategy to leveraging social media sites all the way up to refining and fine tuning your strategies it doesn’t matter if you’re an attorney, Dr., chimney sweep, deck builder, fence company, or marketing agency.

So let’s get started!

If you talk to anyone that knows anything about internet marketing they will tell you the first thing you need to do is come up with a keyword list.

It does not matter if you are wanting to market on a search engine like Google, Bing, or even a social media site like Facebook, Tweeter, or LinkedIn. You need to figure out what keywords people are searching for when they are looking for your business.

Most consumers find businesses online using the search engines and searching for specific keywords that best describe what they are looking for. This puts us in a unique position of being able to put our websites between the search engines and the consumers. That’s why optimizing our websites around keywords that are more likely to be searched for when someone is looking for the type of products or services we provide is important.

It’s sometimes difficult to know exactly what keywords are going give the most targeted traffic for our products or services however; there are ways of determining our many searches or how competitive a keyword is.

To understand what keywords will drive the most relevant traffic to our websites, we first have to understand that keyword research is ongoing and never ending. Good keyword research can help grow a business in both organic and pay per click traffic. And save you from spending money on keywords that are not converting.

Keyword research.

Is it important?

It’s where you’ve got to start…so yes, it’s extremely important!

Any SEO you talk to or any forum you post on or for that matter any e-book you read will all say the same thing: “70% of your success online depends on getting your keywords right!”

There are all kinds of reasons to build keyword list and a lot of it depends on the objective or end goal that you’re trying to accomplish.

For example, someone creating an authority in a niche would most likely start off with a competitive keyword and break the website down going after the long tail keywords later in the process.

However, if someone was going after a micro-niche they would build the website around the keyword that is less competitive and then surround the site with similar keywords.

There is not a day that goes by that I don’t have to stop what I am doing to answer the phone while some stupid SEO tries to sell me his services. And too make it worst there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t get at least two spam emails from some SEO company trying to sell me their services.

Since these guys have decided to drive me crazy I figured I might as well put their information to good use.

So here’s the thing, I am taking my SEO Watch Dog website and I will start doing website reviews for companies that either call or spam me.

If your website isn’t set up correctly then I would think twice before spamming me and since the statics for online SEO vs. Offline marketing look something like this.

1.  80% of consumers research online before buying offline?

2.   70% of people searching Google never click past the first 3 links?

3.   60% of all traffic on the internet is now video?

4.   YouTube is the #1 search engine?

Since you are calling me and sending me spam email instead of using the search engines to drive traffic to your business I can only guess that the reason for this is that you yourself don’t know how to market your own business online.

So you have resorted to offline marketing to sell and online service that you cannot even do.

You can rank for the most sought after terms in SEO but if you don’t have a website that can convert the traffic into sales then you’ve got nothing. SEO has to be a part of your website design, other words; your SEO has to know something about website design and conversion.

Web design is an element of SEO that many amateur SEOs miss.

Who cares how much traffic you can drive to a website if the visitors are laughing at you and leaving? SEO-friendly web design means you get both a good looking website that is able to convert visitors into customers as well as a website that has the potential to rank highly in the search engines, one without the other is useless.

People will make a decision on the credibility of your company in a matter of seconds. It’s human nature, we do it when we meet people on the streets and we will darn well do it before giving someone our hard earned cash.

Credible websites have a certain look and feel.

• Logo top left
• Navigation top of the page or lefthand side
• Less than five colors including images
• Clear, readable text

Common Web Design Mistakes:

• Lack of focus
• Crowded text
• Slow loading times
• Auto-playing music
• Unclear navigation
• Excess redirects

As an SEO, you have to stress the importance of a good website design. If your client is ranked well but he’s not making money at some point he is going to get tired of paying you. Sometimes clients like to stretch the limits of their website designs and this cost them sales.