Keyword Marketing

Keyword marketing is a fundamental skill you should master if you are to be successful with your internet marketing.

The reason you should learn this skill is because taking the time to understand how your customers search online will provide you with ideas as to how you will market your products and services to attract them to buy from you, and give you a better understanding of the types of words and phrases they use when searching for the products you sell.

Furthermore, the information you find whilst doing your research for keyword marketing means you can take control of the market and attract customers by the bucket load using the language they use when looking for your products and services.

Keyword marketing also prevents you from falling into the trap of selling features. You will know exactly the problem your customer is trying to solve and be able to help your customer understand exactly how you solve that problem.

One of the biggest issues customers have when they search for answers to their problems on the internet is that they often find themselves on a webpage that bears little resemblance to the keyword phrase they used to get to the page. This lack of congruity between the keyword phrase and the webpage leads to customers leaving the page within seconds of arriving. Not what you want to happen if you are wanting to sell them something!

By taking the time to understand what keywords and phrases your customers use to find your products or services, you will find it easier to convert visits to sales and you will get more of what Icall ultra-responsive customers buying from you time and time again.

The Keyword Marketing Process

By following the process I am about to describe you have a better chance of making regular sales. The recurring income will motivate you to become even better at keyword marketing, thereby increasing your revenue further for little to no cost, compared to the more traditional offline advertising and leaflet drop activities you may have done before.

By failing to master keyword marketing you will find it difficult to make sales of any significance and your income will become unpredictable and irregular. You may also find yourself resorting to more expensive offline marketing methods that simply eat up any profits you could have made.

For the purposes of this article I define keyword marketing as:

1. Finding the exact keywords your customers use to search for your product or service

2. Understanding whether your customers are buying or browsing, as indicated by the words and phrases they use

3. Determining which words and phrases are the most relevant to your online lead generation activities.

Understanding your customers internet surfing behaviours will produce great results for you relatively easily. If you look at those people who are making thousands, if not millions, online they all have one thing in common. They don’t just understand their customer they know what they search for, the words they use, and whether they are intending to buy or not. Understanding this and using this knowledge can improve your lead generation results ten-fold.

The reason why finding the actual words and phrases your customers use, and understanding the meaning behind them, works is that these days your customers are well informed. Thanks to the internet they can research virtually any topic under the sun so generally when they look for a solution to a problem they already know the type of product or service they are looking for and this influences the words they use.

Understanding why they are using certain words gives you the opportunity to match your product benefits and features directly to their need. By matching your solution more closely to their problem makes it easier for them to see you have the solution they are looking for and their buying resistance is lowered.

So, now you know why keyword marketing is important to your lead generation success, let me show you how to do it. Below are the steps you should take:

Let’s take each of these steps in turn. By the time you have completed each of these steps you will have a targeted list of keyword phrases you should use to generate leads for your product or service.

Step 1 – Choose seed keyword

A seed keyword is your starting keyword that best describes the market or niche your product or service is sold to. For example, if I were to sell a particular brand or model of digital camera my seed keyword would be “digital camera”.
As you can see from my example my seed keyword is actually a phrase consisting of two keywords. This is fine as a starting point.

Go ahead now and choose your seed keyword or phrase.

Step 2 – Get keywords

Now we are going to use our seed keyword to get the keywords our potential customers are using to find our product.
We will use the Google keyword tool that you will find at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Before you do anything else make sure you set the language and country you are targeting by clicking on the edit link as seen in the picture below

Normally it will be set to the country where you are based so you may not need to change this unless you are targeting a country other than your own.

Make sure you have selected the descriptive words or phrases option, enter your seed keyword or phrase in the box, leave use synonyms selected, enter the captcha code into the box and click on “Get keywords”

You will now get a list of keywords that have been searched on Google. Below is part of the list I get when I search for “digital camera”

Step 3 – Find high traffic “buyer” keywords

Next you want to go through this list and choose those keyword phrases that are:

• relevant to your product or service
• are “buyer” keywords
• have a high number of monthly searches

Choosing keyword phrases that are relevant is straightforward. For every keyword phrase ask yourself “Does this phrase fully describe the product or service I plan on selling?” If not, ignore it and move onto the next one, if it does, make a note of it and then move to the next one.

Once you have compiled a list of relevant keyword phrases, go back through this list and decide, for each one, if the phrase is a “buyer” phrase. A buyer phrase is one that shows the person who used it is intending on buying the product.

Let me give you an example. Is my seed keyword phrase “digital camera” a buyer phrase? No it isn’t. What is missing are the specifics such as:

• what make of camera do they want – canon, nikon?
• what model – EOS, coolpix
• what model number – EOS 450D, coolpix 6000

it is these specifics that will appear in a keyword phrase once the customer has decided what they want.

Let’s take this a stage further. If a customer typed in the phrase “canon digital camera” or “cheapest digital camera” are these buyer phrases? Once again no they are not. These types of keyword phrases are what we would call “comparison” phrases.
Searchers who use these phrases have either decided on the make of camera they are interested in but they are not sure what model to buy yet, or they are just looking for the cheapest model of digital camera but have still not decided on the make and model yet.

When choosing your buyer keyword phrases make sure the phrases are as specific as possible.

From your buyer list of keyword phrases you then want to look at the number of monthly searches they get. Any keywords that get more than 100 searches per month I consider to be high traffic keywords. If you have no keywords that get this number of searches choose those that get close. Even if a keyword only has 10 searches a month but is a very specific buyer keyword, select it. Those 10 people are looking to buy. Remember we are not looking for a lot of traffic we are looking for buyers.

Step 4 – Select relevant keywords

If you have done all of the work required in step 3, selecting the relevant keywords to use for your online lead generation campaign has already been done. In this step you should review your list to make sure any non-buyer keywords have not slipped through the net.

Now you have a targeted list of keyword phrases that you know are being searched by actual buyers of your product or service. This list will enable you to target these buyers with the level of confidence that they will buy your product once they see your offer.

Sticking to the keyword research steps

It is very tempting to not follow these four steps exactly as I describe, especially as they seem very simple to do. Here’s how you can stick to the plan and succeed where others before you have failed.

There are several reasons many online marketers fail to follow these simple steps:

1. It is easy to get a long list of keywords quickly

Using tools like the Google tool it is very easy to get a long list of keywords related to your seed keyword without too much effort. Many people see the list and assume that all the keywords are relevant so why not use all of them?

By failing to be selective and finding the real buyer keywords you can waste a lot of time attracting people to your offer who have no intention of buying anything. This wastes time and money that you most probably do not have.

To avoid falling into this trap don’t look at all of the keywords the Google tool returns. Confine yourself to those keywords and phrases that are directly related to your seed keyword. You will find those listed under the section “Keywords related to term(s)entered”. Ignore everything else.

For each keyword listed in this section ask yourself the question “Does this phrase fully describe the product or service I plan on selling?”.

2. Many internet marketers are lazy

It is easy to grab a list of keywords and just use those without having to think. Don’t fall into this trap as you will waste a lot of time, money and effort, for no result.

You can spend many months using the wrong keywords and not generating any worthile leads. Remember it is the quality of the leads you want. Spending a relatively small amount of time selecting the keywords to target will pay off handsomely in revenue and profit.

If you have a lot of keywords on your list, don’t go through all of them in one sitting. Take a break and come back to it. You will find that you will get through the list much faster and be more effective in your selections.

3. Not understanding the difference between buyer keywords and browsing keywords

By failing to understand the difference between buying and browsing keywords, marketers waste time chasing people who have no intention of buying, or simply want the product for free.

You can avoid wasting time on leads that won’t convert by making sure you fully understand what makes a keyword phrase a “buyer”phrase. I described this process in step 3 so go and read that again if you are unsure.

Choosing your keywords carefully will get you leads that are ready to buy thereby increasing your sales conversions significantly.

You will be successful if you follow this step by step plan

By taking the approach to keyword marketing that I have described above you will:

• gain a better understanding of how your customers are phrasing their searches when looking for your product or service
• obtain leads for your product that are better qualified because you will be using “buyer” keywords and phrases
• more easily convert your leads to sales
• make more sales and increase your profit.

The keywords and phrases that this process helps you to identify should be used in your internet marketing and lead generation activities.

For example, you will want to write articles that focus on a particular buyer keyword and you will want to write blog posts describing a benefit of your product that matches a buyer keyword phrase.

You should also focus one of the pages on your website on a relevant, highly searched, phrase. Doing this will get the page indexed for that phrase in the search engines so when your customers use the phrase in a search your web page, and therefore your product, will be found more easily.

Follow this process and you will generate high quality converting leads for your business.