How to Find the Phrases Your Customers Are Using to Find You – Pt2

Hi there, it’s Lesley here again from FreeWebsiteDesign.co.nz, a project brought to you by Aliarts Website Marketing. This tutorial has been split into two, so you are more easily able to find the information you need. Welcome back to part 2 of tutorial 10 in the series, how to find the profitable keywords your customers are using to find you.

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Can’t watch video? Here is a transcript of the audio.

OK, so here you can see Google estimates 2900 searches per month are made for the phrase ‘baby products’ in New Zealand. In my experience, these estimates are actually quite low, and there are actually significantly more searches than this made, but it is a good place to start. While you are optimising your website and getting backlinks for your main search phrase ‘baby products,’ you can start to get traffic fairly quickly through what we call some of the ‘long tail key phrases’ you see here.

For example, while you’re concentrating on getting to page one for ‘baby products,’ you can start to see traffic fairly quickly by targeting some of the less popular phrases. For example, Google may estimate the phrase ‘baby products’ has a search volume of 2900, but ‘baby products nz’ has a search volume of 260. Now what I do to assess the competition of that phrase is to copy the phrase and paste it into Google.co.nz.

What I can see from this, is this phrase would be just as difficult to crack the first page of Google.co.nz as ‘baby products.’ These sites here are obviously very well established, have good page rank, loads of content, and have been around for quite some time. It would be a long time before you made it to page one for this phrase also. You would need to build your site up to what these pages have, not impossible, just not probable in at least your first six months.

But, what I can see here in these page one listings is a directory, so the first thing I would do is list my business in this directory, in this category, paying for the top listings if need be, and your business is automatically page one for this phrase, while you work your way up to the top of the organic listings. You wouldn’t get as much traffic as you would with Google Adwords, but you would still see traffic from having a page one listing. Also for nowhere near $1.96 per click.

So lets try something a little further down the list. For example, you may have some ‘baby skin care products’ in your range you may wish to check out your competition for. Google is showing there is not enough data for this phrase, but just the fact it appears in the list at all means people are searching for this phrase, Google just doesn’t have an estimate for how many at this time. As I mentioned previously, I feel these numbers are low, much lower that listed here, just through previous experience searching for phrases I know to be very popular that return results much lower that you would expect.

OK, so what I can see from this exercise, is the phrase baby products of any kind is quite highly saturated in Google with all the main baby product websites holding first page rankings. It would take a lot of time and effort to crack the first page, and not worth undertaking just yet.

For the time being however, it just shows we need to drill down a little further into our key phrases, and start targeting some of the phrases without so much competition that we can start to appear for straight away.

So let’s have a look down the list of synonyms Google returned for you because you left ‘Use synonyms’ ticked. Here’s a good one, still with quite a high level of searches. You may have a line of ‘baby strollers’ you are able to concentrate on for now. You could choose any of these searches that suit you best. But for this example, let’s go ahead and check for baby stroller phrases with the Google Adwords Tool.

OK, so what you can see is you will still have a good deal of competition with the shorter baby stroller key phrases, and still run into the same problems you did with the baby products searches. But lets have a look down the list to see what we are up against with the longer tail key phrases. Let’s have a look at ‘baby stroller car seat’ for example.

Alright as you can see, this has suddenly started to look a lot more manageable to get to the first page for. The first listing is a TradeMe listing, which would have expired, so no competition. The second is the Tin Shed, and I can see here this has a page rank of one. Page rank is just Google’s rank of how important it thinks you are, and one is fairly low. By undertaking just a few of the ideas in the book we have supplied you with ‘101 Ways to Get Traffic to Your Business Website,’ you could start to outrank this page relatively quickly.

If you are interested in seeing your page rank you should install the Google tool bar, I recommend it for seeing how important Google thinks your website is. I will write an article on exactly how this is done and post it at Aliarts.co.nz.

Most of these sites look like they could be taken on, and you could start to rank in Google.co.nz in a relatively short amount of time with a page optimised for the phrase ‘baby stroller car seat.’ As I have gone into great detail in previous tutorials about how to highly optimise your pages for certain key phrases, I won’t go into it again, but as long as you place variations of ‘baby stroller car seat’ in your title, your URL, your descriptions, your images, and all the places discussed previously, you would end up with a highly optimised page for this phrase and you should start to see results in a relatively short time.

If you would like to save your searches for future use, which I recommend you do, you can scroll down here and click download all keywords as text. This way you can do a search for every phrase you wish to optimise a page for in the search engines, then you can save them to your computer for later use, as shown in previous tutorials.

So there you have it, all you need to know to find keywords without as much competition that you can start to rank for relatively quickly. As usual, if any of this is unclear, or you need to go through it with me, please feel free to let me know on any of the numbers at www.FreeWebsiteDesign.co.nz, or Aliarts.co.nz.

Thanks again, and I’m looking forward to working with you on your new project. Bye.