Keyword Search Management for Small Businesses

Keyword Search
Keeping a list of target keywords with matching pieces of content to review from time to time is good keyword search management. via Flickr

There is a lot of discussing in the online world about SEO and ranking in Google.

Everybody is looking for something that will work fast and bring in tons of traffic to a business website, but that’s now how it works.

Keyword search management is how your small business can compete with large companies. It’s an opportunity, but it will take some time.

Paid Search and Organic Search

Keyword search management is used for both paid search and organic search.

Paid search is a straight forward marketing tool offered by search engines like Google and Bing. You search for keywords – both exact and general – and put text, image and now video ads in the search results. You can even place those ads on website with content that matches your targeted keywords.

Google has a pretty good tool for AdWords (paid) customers. You can use it to figure out what people are searching for and that’s really the unique thing about keyword search – you know the intent of the customer.

When a business advertises during the Super Bowl on TV the business knows that people are football fans or entertainment fans. When you advertise for a specific keyword you know more about what the person is trying to find.

The interesting thing about Google and other search engines is that it all started with organic lists. These organic listings are non-paid meaning the results are not something the website owner or business paid for and it really has an effect on searchers.

In general, users click organic results more often than paid results.

You can make different assumptions about why this happens. The most likely is that people trust what occurs naturally in the world instead of something that is forced.

This is the advantage with organic results.

Keyword Search Management

Ranking well for keywords that your customers are searching for is simple in concept, but difficult in task.

Think about it – all search engines want is to please their users. That means providing the best results. Users want information that is relevant, useful, entertaining and enlightening.

So your task as a small business owner is to create a result that is the most relevant and most useful.

Simple.

Well, we all know creating amazing content is not simple.

But there are some things you can do to improve the traffic you get from search engines.

Keyword Collections

Every business should have a management plan for keywords. Use the tool linked above from Google.

A good place to start is to ask your current customers for the common questions they have. You’re looking for anything they might be search for online whether it’s with search or with social media.

Take the information you get from your customers and start looking for keywords. Google will suggest keywords that get traffic. You can also enter competitor websites and websites of businesses that share the same target customer as you.

Take in all these keywords in a spreadsheet or some kind of collection.

Content Marketing and Blogging

Once you have all these keywords your task is to create content for them.

  • Guides
  • Blog Posts
  • Videos
  • Articles
  • Stories
  • Etc.

These are the things people are looking for and it’s really not that different than it’s ever been. People have always craved information. With the Internet we have access to more information than ever before.

But to really make a difference with keyword search management you have to create the best content for the keywords you’re targeting.

It’s not about links. It’s not about the number of times you mention a word on a page.

Those are byproducts of creating the best content for each keyword.

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