How Much Regular Keyword Research and Competitor Analysis Are You Doing?
In our industry that is Search Marketing, we tell business owners everyday that Keyword Research is one of the most important, valuable, and high return activities you have to be involved in doing on a regular basis. Ranking for the “right” keywords can make or break your website. No matter which way you cut it, the road to your website page offering its products or services is in most cases going to begin with words typed into a search box.
Conduct Regular Website Performance Analysis
Conducting a website performance review on a regular basis and monitoring the dashboards that matter is going to contribute towards you doing Keyword Research, but it is amazing how many business owners still do not contribute sufficient amounts of time and effort to this very important task. And in many cases, especially in the small business community there are lots of business owners who don’t even know where to find a keyword tool that they should be using in order to conduct this vital analysis.
The First Step Towards Building Your Successful Website
When you come to build your first website or decided you are going to redevelop the website you already have, keyword research should be at the forefront of your strategy to ensure when you build this website vehicle that has to make you money (otherwise why are you in business), because the words are the ‘fuel’ that will help the paying audience you want to find you and then engage with you. But here we are in 2014 and still many businesses are failing to conduct this all important task. If you are to brief your web developer properly and provide a detailed web design specification, that blueprint will be constructed based on this first step – Keyword Research.
Do You Really Want To Rank Number One For Your Keyword?
Keyword research will continue to be a fundamental task to fuel your website even after your site is built and launched. Trawling through keywords and measuring their performance will be a regular rinse and repeat exercise to find out what keyword terms are actually being entered into a search engine and whether they are popular with target market audience you are keen to attract. ICTADVISOR are always amazed to find when speaking at events here in Scotland just how many businesses are not doing any keyword research – at all. The problem is mainly inherent within the micro and small business community where the business owner and staff involved in running the company are to busy doing just that – running the business – and don’t have sufficient time, resource, and budget to do any form of regular website marketing. And yet, when you ask a business owner what they want the website to do, the first answer is usually – “I WANT TO BE NUMBER ONE ON GOOGLE” or “I NEED SALES” and yet to achieve either of these is always going to start by doing Keyword Research. We should throw a comment into the mix here, that you all can’t be NUMBER ONE for your preferred keyword. Let’s make something absolutely clear, it is not about being NUMBER ONE, but it certainly is about being on PAGE ONE of your preferred search engine that you want to aim for. But there are still a couple of other steps you need to overcome. When your business finds out what keywords your target market audience are likely to enter into a search engine to find your website, another step you will reach is How To Do Competitor Analysis.
How To Win Against Your Website Competitor
Competitor analysis and keyword research really go hand in hand. Once you have compiled your keyword list you have to go back out to your preferred search engine such as Google and test those keywords you have researched, and ask yourself more questions:
- Who is the competition?
- Who is already ranking on page one right now in the search engine you are optimising your website for?
- What does that competitor website look like?
- Is it aesthetically appealing?
- What approach has the competitor taken with the design and layout in order to ASK FOR THE SALE!
Are you finding from reading this that the process to having a successful website with successful landing pages is now taking a number of hours of your time? Of course it is, because it does take time to compile this data that is the fuel to make your website win races around the internet track!
Now to be a successful website business owner your next task that you have to overcome, is that all important goal you must get once you have managed to get traffic and visitors to your web page offer – Conversion.
That is another story to tell……..See You Soon.