How To Perform Keyword Research For Your Local Business Website

Performing keyword research for your business to display either in a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, article marketing, or social bookmarking is by far one of the most important things you can do to gain traffic to your website. A lot of businesses do this poorly and wonder why they do not get traffic.

For example, let’s say you own a flower shop in White Bear Lake, MN, which is where I live, and you’re putting together a website and planning your onsite and offsite marketing campaign. The first sets of keywords that would come to mind are “White Bear Lake flower shop”, or “your business name” + “flower shop”, or a derivative thereof. Other “local” businesses who are not reading this post, may just decide to use “flower shop” instead. Do you realize how broad that keyword term is and how much you would pay in PPC to get high rankings on Google?

What you want to focus on are the longtail-keywords, keywords that are more than one or two words longs. Longtail keywords provide you with longevity because you have to put thought into them and can quickly achieve #1, #2, or #3 rankings on Google for them.

How do you go about getting those longtail keywords? Start off with the broad keyword for your local business and expand from it by adding related words as prefix or suffix to that word. Ask your customers wheat they would type into Google if they wanted to find your business. Thinking outside the box by asking your customers and clients will quickly enable you to come up with a sizeable list that you can quickly dominate on Google.

You can also grow your list of keywords by remembering last minute keywords. We’ll go back to the flower business example from before. If you have a customer that has forgotten his/her anniversary and is looking for flowers 5 minutes ago, he/she is going to be desparate to find something relatively quickly. He/she might search for “same day flower delivery in vinings” or “last minute flowers purchase” + “your city”. Do you see how the desparateness of this search can produce dramatic results? So, if you had that keyword SEO on your site or had it as part of an article in your acticle marketing efforts, you would definitely attract that customer to your site and have him/her as a client.

I cannot over emphasize how powerful and important it is to do keyword research for your marketing efforts. This is what customers search for in order to get to your site. Constantly grow your keywords list, track what works, and continue to do onsite and offsite optimization in order to get more traffic for your business.

One other trick is to use similar keywords that have some overlap. You can also use the singular and plural form of a term, change the order the keywords, or maybe use the common misspelling of the word in your campaign.

This is by no means an exhaustive tips on doing keyword research. I will certainly revisit this topic again and again

The next post will be on tracking your traffic in order to fine tune your results and better optimize your site. This is probably the second most important thing you could do for your business.