As a small business owner you may not have a lot of time to dedicate to learning all about online marketing, SEO and how to promote yourself online. But if you need to start learning SEO somewhere, keyword research is the single skill that will bring you the biggest benefits. Forget about link building and page rank, if your pages aren’t keyed to the right keywords you won’t get the results you are expecting. There are many reasons why small business owners should learn, at least, the basics of keyword research:
Choosing Keywords That Are Likely To Work Out
You may have already a pretty good idea of what sort of keywords your clients use to find you, and if you are using Analytics software that idea is probably quite accurate. However, unless you learn keyword research you may find out that those keywords are too competitive for you to have a chance to rank among the top 10. Learning how to find keywords that are easy to rank for is key to getting your SEO strategy off the ground.
Improving Content Creation
From a search engine optimization standpoint, content that already includes high quality keywords is much more likely to rank even before you actually start working on off-site factors such as back-links, even if you don’t know everything about SEO content writing. But if you perform keyword research in advance you’ll also find out the process of creating content easier, as you’ll be able to derive topics to write about from the keywords people are using to search. By knowing the keywords each blog post or article is optimized for you’ll be also able to improve your internal link building strategy, and create a website that it’s easier to navigate.
Lowering Your SEO Costs
If you plan on hiring a third party company to do your SEO, knowing your way around using keywords in search engine optimization means you’ll be better equipped to know if they are actually worth the money you are paying. You will also save yourself from hearing nasty surprises such as: “We really need to rewrite most of your website pages, it will be a week’s (paid) work” and generally will be able to start your SEO campaign a step ahead of that poor sod that just wrote from the top of his head, without thinking about the search engines. The less work your SEO company has to do, the less money they’ll charge you.
There are many tutorials about how to use free tools such as the Google Keyword Tool or even more advanced ones such as Market Samurai in order to perform your own keyword research for your small business. Within a few hours you’ll be able to confidently choose keywords that you can rank for, and will bring you the right kind of traffic, and that’s the first thing on any online marketing checklist.
