You’ve got an eye-catching website, active social media pages, an engaged mailing list, a helpful blog and a great lead magnet to tempt potential customers, but the truth is that you could have ALL of this and only be found by a handful of people every month, which is an issue when you are looking for new business opportunities!
Thankfully, the answer to increasing your visibility online can be relatively simple. If you’ve got a little time, you can invest in keyword research, search engine optimisation (SEO), and paid-for advertising on Google (Google Ads), or know someone who can!
The likelihood is that, at the moment, most visitors reach you through your physical networking activities or recommendations from your existing customers. However, thousands of people out there don’t yet know your business name or follow you on social media but are looking for the exact product/service mix that you deliver.
So how can you find them? First, you must conduct keyword research to determine what people are searching for online. Here are my top tips for keyword research:
1.) Use a keyword planner tool to investigate how people might search for your business. Tools like Keyword Strategy Tool are low cost and can help you understand how people are actively searching for the products and services you offer when they type questions or queries into a search engine search bar.
2.) Consider using less jargon – unless most of your customers work within the same industry as you and have similar technical knowledge, jargon-filled keywords might not be the best choice! However, it’s worth double-checking search volumes (the number of people searching for specific keywords every month) for jargon terms and more ‘mainstream’ language to double-check the terminology people use to find services and products similar to yours online. Once you’ve worked out which word (technical or otherwise) best describes a particular product/service you offer, note it (and any other relevant phrases that you can find!).
3.) Don’t use your Business name as a keyword (unless you are a huge and well-known brand). Ideally, you want people who don’t know you and your business to find you online, opening up your audience beyond your existing clientele, so using a more descriptive keyword could help you achieve this. Of course, if you’re an international soft drinks manufacturer with a highly recognisable red can or another global and instantly recognisable brand, feel free to rely on your brand name!
4.) Don’t be too general – it may seem as though targeting a general search term with thousands of monthly searches is a great idea, but you need to be more specific if you want relevant and meaningful traffic to your website. For example, suppose you’re an IT specialist (a keyword searched for 14,800 times per month globally). In that case, it might seem like a great idea to use the keyword phrase ‘IT Specialist,’ but you’re competing against hundreds, if not thousands, of other businesses doing the same. Why not focus on a particular software or service you are particularly experienced in as a potential keyword? For example, ‘Ruby on Rails developer’ is a lot more specific to what you do, and there are far fewer developers out there offering that exact service, but there are still 2400 global monthly searches for that phrase.
Once you have carried out keyword research for your business, it’s time to boost your website visibility by optimising one relevant page for one highly relevant keyword. If you’ve got a WordPress website, tools like Yoast can help you achieve this, but the general advice is to incorporate your chosen keyword into the following places:
- The page title
- In the URL slug
- As an H1 Heading on the page
- Incorporated naturally into the content on the page
- As an alt-tag for one image on the page
- In the Meta-description (or snippet) for the web page
Once you have optimised your website, it can take a little time for your pages to rank for your chosen keywords, so be patient! You could always invest in some Google Ads (using highly relevant keywords) until the organic search results move properly. Thanks to the research you’ve carried out, you can work to ensure that your Ad spend is as low as possible while the relevance of your adverts remains as high as possible.
Keyword Research, on-page optimisation and paid-for advertising via Google Ads can boost your website’s online visibility, so why not do a little keyword research today? It’s a valuable and exciting exercise.