When customers go to look for you online, are they able to find you using the keywords that best describe your business? Better yet, have you gone through your social media profiles and optimized them, being sure to include those words that best describe your business or position?
If not, you could be missing out on a lot of business, and that alone is a good enough reason to reexamine your profiles. To start with, let’s get a basic grasp on what keywords are, and how they function on the internet.
Lets say you’re a company that has just created the ultimate diet pill. The word ‘diet’ would be one of the keywords you’d use in order to market your business, and more than likely it’s one of the words you’d be including in your website development in order to generate a higher search engine ranking.
The word ‘diet’ alone, however, can generate upwards of 32 million hits per month, depending on the time of year (January, for example, will probably generate more diet queries as people jump on their New Years resolutions to lose weight, versus August when consumers are focused on other events), and that makes this word a very, very competitive (and expensive) keyword to operate under.
However, when you add keywords like ‘diet’ and ‘weight-loss’ to your social media profiles on big-name sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and so on, you increase your ability to compete with everyone else using that same keyword, and will end up ranking higher on searches.
But wait, how do you decide what keywords to use? Here are a couple of things to keep in mind.
For starters, ask yourself and other people you know what keywords they would use to search for a business like yours. Then think of similar keywords, or derivatives of keywords – for example “diet vs. dieting vs. grapefruit diet.” Most SEO specialists will encourage you to incorporate a mix of keywords – both general, and specific – to your business, in order to catch your target audience.
- CC Image “Lifestyle Keywords vs Product & Brand Keywords” by Craig Key on Flickr
You can also check out your competitor’s websites in order to see what keywords they use. Or, use Google’s Keyword Tool to search for relevant, but less-used keywords you may not have thought of before.
April 15, 2010 at 7:43 am
Keep posting stuff like this i really like it
September 12, 2010 at 6:31 pm
I am interested in local seo marketing but I’m in another nation, does anyone help me with some choices?
December 1, 2010 at 9:06 am
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May 29, 2011 at 10:02 am
I think that it is a great idea to incorporate keywords in to your profiles – in my mind, why wouldn’t you? The other thing to make sure of is that your profile includes a link back to your website – having a link from a Facebook or LinkedIn profile is nice to have!
Andrew
May 30, 2011 at 12:12 pm
@A. Hagan – thanks for your comment! Links that go to your Facebook page are very popular right now – and the more apps you have – the more they’re becoming like real websites anyway!