How do you make Google like your site?
You play fair. You offer real, valuable content. You don’t try to play games.
It’s a bit like a popularity contest, really. Someone searches on Google, and Google scours the Internet looking for the most relevant results possible. It looks at your website (if you’re catching Google’s attention) to evaluate whether your site is a relevant results.
It looks at other websites to see whether they’ve got an opinion of your site’s relevance for that search. It pays special attention to websites it already respects. The goal is to have all of these (your site and other respected sites) essentially voting for your website.
And the best news is, essentially, you can stuff the ballot box. That means your website will get listed toward the top, you’ll make it easier for more prospective customers to find you online (even if they don’t know your name), they’ll visit your site and be far more likely to call or come in, and they’ll want to do business with you.
The rest of this book is going to lay out a plan for you to achieve online domination. It’s a bit like playing chess – but with the end goal of helping your customers to get what they really want and need (you!).
Know how in most projects, there’s a preparation phase that’s boring, tricky, tedious, and yet completely crucial to the success of the rest of the project?
That’s this part.
Skip this, and you’ll be in good (bad?) company. You’ll get to dive into dozens of online marketing tasks that are way more fun – but you won’t be able to do them correctly. You’ll jump ahead to the part where you get to climb the ladder – but you’ll figure out pretty quickly your ladder wasn’t leaning on the right tree.
What is it? Keyword research.
Yes, just as boring and techy as it sounds. But without it, you’ll completely waste your time and money and get way less than optimal results.
We’ll try to make this as painless as possible.
What Is Keyword Research?
When people go searching for information, products, and services, what they type into Google (and we’ll just use Google to represent all of the search engines) is a keyword. A keyword could actually be a whole phrase – even a really long one – or just a single word.
Keyword research involves studying how people search online. Seems like it would be pretty intuitive and straight-forward, until you dig a little deeper. For our example of searching for dog training tips, keyword research might reveal that people go looking for that same information using these keywords:
• how to train a dog
• dog training
• tips for training dogs
• how can I get my dog to stop barking?
• dog barks
• puppy training
• Labrador Retriever training
• my dog won’t stop barking at the delivery man
• dog bark help
• why does my dog bark
• puppies help
• help dogs
• …and about a million other variations
People search in odd ways online. Sometimes in ways you’d never imagine. Sometimes with misspellings, ‘wrong’ terms, slang, bad grammar, and generalities or specifics that are mind-boggling.
It’s just about impossible to predict how your customers will go looking for you online. It’s really better not to even try, because you’ll always be wrong – you just may not know it.
