When no one listens, there’s no use talking at all.
Do you hear me, do you care?
Remember the lyrics to the popular 80’s hit? I just got back from a dinner with a client and it’s all I hear in my head after the conversation we had tonight. I’m really listening closely to what my clients understand about their message, and in a more ethereal sense, their words.
In my head, the lyrics are, “What are words worth, when no one listens anymore? No one notices, I think I’ll dye my hair blue.” As a chic, I get it. I don’t think that’s so different from a desperate small business point of view. When we’re young, like the song suggests, we’d do anything to get attention immediately, to be noticed – even bizarre to border line nuts.
Let me explain to you exactly why keyword research and word relevance are more important than flash and hype.
Keywords Are Powerful
Online, your words couldn’t be more powerful. You can have all the graphics and keywords, and even a fair number of readers, but to be found by the maximum number of people who need you, it will take more than that. You’ll need a marketing strategy.
Case in point:
Out of curiosity, I used one of the companies I represent as a model for some basic SEO and Page Rank experimentation. I’ve been doing their media releases and fliers, but not the Web site. This company has believed that their Web site was optimized. Since competition in their field is minimal, they were easily found on the first page of Google search if you knew what to look for. I learned that not only were they absolutely not searched on for their most prevalent keyword phrases, they weren’t showing at all for the phrases people actually look for.
That blew my mind, because with a Page Rank of 3, you’d assume they had a few things on the ball. But their keywords weren’t working. Zero traffic on the terms used.
So what to do? Is this a problem? Well, for one thing, if the words you think your customers use, aren’t in fact, the words they use, how will they find you if they don’t already know your specific website address? If your business presence online is new, will your market know your exact address?
Long Tail Optimization
Zero To Sixty Marketing decided to use this company as an example to see where we could improve our customer discussions. Using Market Samurai for keyword research, we ran the currently used keywords against long tail options that sounded more reasonable for searchers to use. Long tail keywords are words that are run through a system based on the original keywords and determined to have market merit based on the level of traffic and competition for that word or phrase.
What a difference. We realized the words we ran through Market Samurai, that were not used before, had huge amounts of traffic and very little competition.
What does that mean? It means that many people are surfing the net searching on terms and keywords that apply to this business, but the words weren’t used in tags, bullets, headers, and titles to cause that site to show up in search results for them. What’s more, very few other companies represented in that niche were using those terms to promote their own business. Can you say ‘goldmine?’
What Are Words Worth To You?
So think about that. You may not be an SEO believer, but there’s undeniable merit to a case study like this. The advice I gave this company was to start using those keywords effectively in posts to blogs, comments, and high authenticity sites. Link building can actually improve keyword strength for the term you want to use while you’re using words that are already proven. Over time, previously unused terms become more common place, and therefore used. This is a very effective link building exercise, well worth the effort.
Take the time to develop relationships with high authority sites via comments and linking strategies. Use the keywords in such a way that the reader stays on the page to learn more about your business, interesting related links, and possibly – hopefully, comment and leave their link so that a relationship can begin.
So I don’t think you need to dye your hair blue, or anything, that’s just a song.
Picture Credit: danielleblue from Flickr
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Using Keyword Research Tools PT3,
Great post on the importance of good SEO. Pictures may be worth a thousand words but keywords rule in the world of SEO.
Thank you for your comments, Cindy. We really appreciate it when our readers take the time to respond to our posts. 2010 is bound to bring us all back to the drawing board to some degree, but the basics are still the best way to ensure we’re on the right track moving forward. Continuing to actually communicate with our readers by deliberately choosing words and strategies that they are already using will bring them back time and time again. Even then, it takes time to grow naturally. That’s good though; it means tiny algorithm changes shouldn’t set us back to square one in one fell swoop.
It must work, even though I STILL don’t fully understand how. I received Google alerts about this post before it was even sent out, simply because my name is in the “Blogroll” over there to the right. Forget wearing a t-shirt with my logo; how much to get you to use my name in all your blog posts?!
Awesome. Nice to see it working like it should. Don’t beat yourself up about understanding how it works, it changes so frequently that the only real success is with natural organic progression using basic strategies and being current as possible on SEO ‘climate’ changes. Karon Thackston with Wordtracker Academy recently wrote about it here in her post SEO Copy Doesn’t Have To Sound Like That I thought it was a good read. Now, to figure out how much to charge for the use of your name…