Along Came a Spider - Keyword Rich Copy Works - But Only When You Have A Plan - page 2

by Julia Hyde, 7/6/2005

Choose your words carefully.

Having completed all these tasks, it's time to make sure the words you plan to use on your site include the words and phrases your potential customers will use when they type a query into a search engines search function. "That's easy," you say. "If people want to buy a camera, they'll type the word "camera" into Google." Well, yes and no. They may indeed type the word "camera" but they could also type in lots of variations depending on what exactly it is they're looking for.

The only way to truly identify these words and phrases is to spend a serious amount of time doing some keyword research. Just in case you're not convinced, here's an example of how research helped one business target the exact words their potential customers were using.

What a difference a word makes.

AutoWorld Santa Cruz, (www.autoworldsantacruz.com) a small, family-owned car rental company in Santa Cruz, California, was in trouble. Several international car rental companies - Hertz and Enterprise - had moved into town and diluted their customer base.

AutoWorld knew that dollar for dollar they couldn't hope to compete with these global giants-print advertising, television commercials, pay-per-click etc. The only thing they could do was try and target potential customers who used the Web to search for goods and services, and who, perhaps, preferred to deal with a smaller, family-owned business.

But before they could begin to target these potential customers, AutoWorld first had to know exactly (and not guess) what words they were using when they searched. And the only way to find out was by doing some extensive keyword research.

Before deciding to do the keyword research AutoWorld had used the phrases "Auto Rentals" and "Auto Sales" throughout their site. But when the research was complete, it revealed that very few people typed these phrases when they searched. Instead terms like, "car rentals," "truck rentals," "cargo vans for rent" etc. were more popular.

It turned out that the words AutoWorld had been using on their site -- and the words the search engines had been seeing when they crawled the site -- were the wrong words. As a result, AutoWorld Santa Cruz had been missing out on a considerable amount of traffic, and potential sales.

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