As part of launching our new website: http://www.foodweek.com.au/, I started to do some keyword research. One of the methods to do keyword research is to look at your competitors websites and websites which comes up under a search term for your proposed keywords and see which keywords they are using.

I was surprised, not to say shocked, to find out that many reputable websites with good content and good page rank do not have keywords nor description set up on their pages. I mean, you don’t have to hire a search engine specialist to set up a few keywords on your website. All you need to do is send an email to your webmaster asking him to load your keywords and page description to the relevant pages. If you have a content management system which supports uploading the keywords yourself, it’s even better as it won’t cost you a thing.

So, before or after you read the rest of this post, go to your home page and other pages and check whether your keywords are set or not.

Anyway, I started at the end just to express my feelings. I won’t write a long post about choosing keywords but I will tell you that it is one of the most, if not the most important aspect of your website optimisation. Website optimisation, among other things, is designed to get traffic to your website through search engines.

When a person uses a search engine and enters the words “retail recruitment company”, the search engine will go to all the pages it has in its index and among other things, will look for those specific keywords. If you page has those keywords, most chances are that your website will come up on the results page. Whether it comes up on page 1 or page 500 depends on many other criteria but it will most likely come up. If you don’t have those keywords set up on your page, it will most certainly not come up.

So how do you choose your keywords? I will make it short. If you want more information you can find it out there on the web.

1. Think about all the words and phrases that people may use to search for your services. Anything you can think of.
   • Don’t just go for the most generic ones like “retail recruitment”. Go for the distinct searches because they are the ones most likely to get traffic for your website. It is called the theory of “The long tail” which basically means that those distinct search queries all together will generate more traffic than the generic keywords.
   • So think about phrases such as: “retail recruitment company in Sydney”
   • “retail recruitment for hardware retailer”
   • “working in retail in Australia”
   • And many other search queries.
2. Look at your competitor’s websites. It may be that some of them already hired a search engine optimiser who researched many possible words. To see which keywords they have chosen you can go to their page and then clicking on your browser’s menu: View->source. A notepad will open with a lot of code. At the top of the page somewhere you should be able to find the following words: <META NAME=”keywords” CONTENT=”retail, retail recruitment,…..”>. The bold words are the keywords which the search engine sees.
3. Use the ~ search query - A useful way to find those websites which has a specific keyword (which is helpful to see what other keywords they use) is to enter the following search query in Google for example: ~recruitment company. Using the ~ sign will generate all of those websites which are indexed for that specific keyword. You can then take it from there to explore who is using which keywords.
4. Use Google external AdWords tool – this tool allows you to enter a keyword or a phrase and Google will generate more keywords and even give you information about the search volume and bidding price for pay per click advertisement. This is the link: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
5. Another tool similar to the Google tool is overture: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
6. Use dictionaries and other tools to help you find nouns and related verbs to your keywords. The Princeton Wordnet tool is very useful: http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

There are more ways but I think what you have here should be enough to get you started. Start with setting your keywords then look at other ways to promote your website.

Now with all those keywords, you should choose the ones that better fit your website and your content.

If you want this done but don’t want to do it yourself, just get in touch with me and we will find a way to get it done for you.

Good luck,

Nati.

Hi Everyone,

After spending a few months specialising in managing Google Adwords campaigns and taking their exam, I recently received my Google Adwords Qualified Professional certificate.

If anyone wants my help or advice, I am here.

Regards,

Nati.

I have started this blog in order to give retailers and other service providers in the retail industry the tools and knowledge they need in order to use the internet as an efficient marketing channel. It is not enough to build a website if no one is visiting it. It is not enough to build a website if the website is not converting the visit into something valuable: a lead, sale, branding impact, recruitment tool etc.

Internet marketing is a complex issue. It involves many forms of marketing. The beauty is that many of them are free.

This blog will discuss Internet Marketing in detail over the next few months, but I decided to start with an introduction to search engine marketing since it is the most popular marketing tool, and if you know how to use it right, it provides the best return on investment.

Search engine marketing comprises two main methods:

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - A marketing technique of preparing a website to enhance its chances of being ranked in the top results of a search engine once a relevant search is undertaken. A number of factors are important when optimising a website, including the content and structure of the website's copy and page layout, the HTML meta-tags and the submission process (There is much more to it than just changing your website's structure but I will discuss in it future posts).

The purpose of the search engine optimisation is to rank the website at the top of the organic search. The organic search is everything which is not a paid search. On Google for example, the organic search is the white box in the middle. The paid search is the blue box at the top of the page - and the results on the right-hand side column. They are marked as “sponsored search”. Take for example our website, Inside Retailing Online. If you search under Google Australia for Retail News you will see that we rank very highly, most of the time as number 1.

So the purpose of SEO is to get your website to rank highly under the organic search results. If you are rating as one of the top websites in the organic search results, that is a promising start which will generate free traffic to your website.

But - and this is the big one - it is not easy to rank highly under the organic search. It requires a lot of effort and most of the time will require hiring a professional to do it for you. This may be an expensive procedure and success is not guaranteed. Even if you are successful, no one guarantees you will be number 1 for ever and you would probably have to keep working on it. Nevertheless, if you can do it, it is the best internet marketing you can do.

Search Engine Advertising (SEA) – An online advertising payment model in which payment is based solely on qualifying click-throughs. Even if you are successful in your SEO efforts, you will never be able to rank as number one for all the keywords which are relevant for you.

For example, Inside Retailing may rank number one under the key term retail news but if you search for retail industry you will see that under the organic search, we do not appear on the first page of search results. That is why I had to add  the keywords: “retail industry” to my SEA campaign so that I will not lose the traffic of those people searching for Retail Industry. This is where SEA complements SEO. What you should avoid is a case where you are doing SEA to those keywords which your website will come up highly under the organic search anyway. It that case, you might be paying for traffic that you could have got for free.

SEA is a great tool which gives marketing departments (if you have one) an amazing ROI (return on investment) if it is done right. If you are a medium size company, you would hire an SEA consultant to do it for you. If you are a small business (and that is something you won’t hear a lot from SEA consultants) I recommend either learning it by yourself or taking a one day training course which will show you most of the things you need to know in order to manage your own SEA campaign.

SEA kicks in when it is too hard, too expensive, or sometimes not worth the effort to do SEO. SEA is so crucial in search engine marketing that whoever is not doing it is missing a great opportunity. The system works like a market with companies bidding for keywords. The more demand, the higher the price. That is why it is a good time to do it now while the competition is not too strong.

In future posts I will elaborate on DYI SEO and SEA. If you want to know more, I am always happy to help and you can contact me either by leaving a message under the comments below or contacting me at Inside Retailing.

Good luck and good night.

Nati.