To Google, the most widely used search engine in the world, your keywords are your identity. Your company name, the names of your directors, and the list of important words it can glean by spidering your site define you. If Google can’t figure out who you are, then no one can find you online… and that will almost certainly be catastrophic to your business.
When someone is searching for you online they are almost always a customer. It is rare that you search for a business that you aren’t considering working with, or try to find a product you aren’t thinking of buying. This means that being found is a key step to closing a sale online.
Not all keywords are created equal. You want to choose the keywords that are:
- Most important to your customers
- Allow you to be found by those most likely to buy
- Ensure that those who already know you or your business can find you easily
If there are thousands of plumbers in London, how can you differentiate your plumbing business online so it is found first by most searchers. You choose the right keywords, buy the right domain, and build your site around what you know is most important to your target market.
There are a wide variety of tools online, many created by Google, that will help you to find out what your customers are searching for. You can use them to understand when they look for you, why they look for you, and what they want you to deliver when they finally find you. This kind of insight into your consumer behaviour is the kind of thing large companies used to try to and capture with focus groups. This kind of insight is now available to you online if you know how to find it. You can discover what your customer is looking for when they search for you. You can discover what kind of promise they want.
“One of the most important things you can learn from this bootcamp is that the entire Internet is a database.”
Data goes into the database day in and day out. You can query that database and you can use the information you discover to funnel customers to your business. It is a cognitive shift you must make to thrive on and off line.
You can’t really change what customers want in the aggregate. You can’t correct their behaviour and make them search more rationally, buy more cleverly, choose more wisely. But you can learn to understand their behaviour better, and communicate with them more effectively.
Small business can punch through the web to their customers with tight targeting of their keywords, and by shaping their appeal to give customers what they think they want.
WHAT DO YOU THINK?