How To Choose Keywords For Your Website

What's the difference between sleeping on the couch and a night of romance? What's the difference between your letter going into the bin or converting to sales? What's the difference between page 1 of Google and page 121?

Keywords.

Keywords are those little words or strings of words that trigger a response in the mind of the reader (whether that reader is human or machine). They are the difference between action and inaction. Pass and fail. They are hot buttons, "don't go there" words or power words.

Ok, but how do you know which keywords you should be targeting in what medium? Well the simplest advice is if you want to trigger action in a human your keywords need to trigger an emotion or bounce off a value.

Humans are not as complex as we think. People are motivated by love, greed, passion, envy, pride, laziness, jealousy, lust, companionship, belonging and a whole raft of other emotions. Powerful copy taps into these emotions and triggers a response. If you want to sell, you need to work out what emotion drives people to buy your product or service and then use words that reflect this emotion.

But the other thing to remember is that people are also driven by their logical mind. They also need to have reasons that are more logical and rational that they can explain to their neighbours, family and friends. John Carlton terms this your logical and lizard mind response.

If you hype someone up with just emotional keywords, but leave off the rational reasons, you will get high buyer's remorse and sales refunds. If you focus just on the rational but leave out the emotion, your sales with be lacklustre as people will find reasons not to buy. People need both rational and emotional keywords for most sale success.

But what about on websites? This is where the game gets a bit more complex. On websites you still have a human audience so you need to keep your balance of rational and emotional keywords. But you also have a second layer you need to write for a computer audience.

Search engines look through websites and check the words that are used on the site as part of their algorithm in determining where to place a website in search engine results. The better the match, the higher the website appears in the results.

The challenge is that people are the ones that type keywords into search engines in the first place and each person's mind thinks slightly differently.
When you create keywords for your website, you may have a particular term or piece of jargon that you use all the time in your business and that know exactly what it means (say for example you use the word Barista).

Clients on the other hand may not be able to spell so they type Barrista or Barissta. Other clients may think a Barista is someone who practices law so they may not use that word. Others may only look for baristas (plural). Still other clients may just type in coffee maker and not use barista at all. Will you be found in the search results for those clients?

When you are looking at creating the keywords for your website you need to be able to determine the most likely words for your goods or service, but the unusual left field ones. Often the left field words get the most website traffic and have less competing webpages, which means if you target those keywords you will appear higher in search engines.

Choosing your keywords for your website for search engines is a real art form in itself. A good SEO company or SEO copywriter should be able to provide you with a detailed report that shows you all of the keywords and associated keywords around your good or service.

Your keyword report should be able to tell you how many people per day actually type that keyword into search engines in your targeted search area (Australia, US, the world for example) and how much competition there is for those words. (If there is high competition, then keywords by themselves will not be enough to give you great search engine rankings.)

They should also be able to give you an indication of whether or not people typing in those words actually are looking to buy something when they type in the words.

Once you get your report, your SEO company or SEO copywriter should give you suggestions about the best words to target and seek your opinion if there are any industry specific terms they may have missed from their research in order to give you a thorough report.

Finally, your keyword reports need to be run every 6 months or so to pick up changes in Google algorithms or changes in how people look for things. Keywords are not static they change over time, so all businesses need to put in regular checking processes to ensure they are tapping into current trends.

With your website, you need to ensure you are using a blend of rational, emotional and search engine friendly keywords to get the best results. If you are not sure if your blend is right, then an SEO copywriter can help you create the right balance of words across all the areas.