In the offline business world, successful business owners present products or services to potential buyers in attractive and welcoming places located where their target market shops. They advertise in the media their target market uses.
But the online target market finds products and services differently. They don’t go to the online shopping mall and click until they find an attractive shop. Usually, they don’t browse, casually come across an ad, and clip a coupon for later use. What makes the online target market different, in particular, is that they are actively looking for a specific product or service online such as a newly released CD or a blue plaid shower curtain or a local restaurant with a vegetarian menu.
The successful online business person puts an effective website before the customer who is targeting his product or service by building on a foundation of keywords.
The Website Foundation: Keywords
Think about how people shop on the Internet. When looking online, they target a particular product or service. They type a word or two into a search engine like Google that returns links to websites. These websites include the word or phrase that was typed. In the Internet world, this is called a “keyword search.”
Keyword Tools Help Business Owners Get in Front on Online Customers
Businesses that need to know if potential customers are searching for services like the ones they offer can go to a free site on the Internet such as Google’s Adwords Keywords Tool. There, the business owner can type in a keyword (like “restaurant”) or a keyword phrase (like “Italian restaurant”). A list will be returned with the numbers of people searching on Google for the keyword or keyword phase and similar ones within the last month.
For example, a restaurant owner in Williamsburg, Virginia, might want to see how often people search for restaurants. If he typed in “restaurant” the numbers of searchers would be in the millions, so he might use a more limiting keyword phase, such as “restaurant Williamsburg Virginia.” He would see that about 6,000 people used Google to search for restaurants in his town last month. He would also see that many thousands also searched for “pizza Williamsburg Virginia,” “Italian food Williamsburg Va,” “bar Williamsburg,” and other related terms.
This restaurant owner would want his information to be found online! The College of William and Mary has many students who shop online. Many thousands of visitors come to the museums at Colonial Williamsburg and Jamestown and nearby attractions such as Busch Gardens, Great Wolf Lodge, and Prime Outlets. In many cases, they wouldn’t have an opportunity to consider coming to his restaurant if he did not have a website! Worse yet, if his website is full of pretty pictures rather than keywords, search engines, much less potential customers, will not find his restaurant. Search engines can't read pictures. From a search engine perspective pictures, color, and other design elements are ignored.
Website Owners Build Efficient Websites Using Keywords
Looking at the list of keywords and keyword phrases below “restaurant Williamsburg Virginia,” the restaurant owner would see that more people search for Italian cuisine than steaks, and that pizza was the food most often searched for in Williamsburg last month. If the restaurant owner specializes in Italian food but also offers pizza, he will learn from this that he should dedicate a page of his website to pizza exclusively. This is important because of the way that search engines “learn” what is on the web in order to return a good list of site options to the web searcher. By “telling” the web search engine that he sells pizza, he is using a search engine optimization (SEO) Internet marketing strategy.
Design an Effective Website
By conducting research on keywords, the restaurateur knows a lot about how his target market thinks. In addition to “restaurant Williamsburg Virginia,” they searched for types of food, they included words like “children’s menu” in their search, and they also looked for places that served brunch or cocktails or some other item.
Now, he can get in front of people who are looking for him online by including lots of appropriate keywords or keyword phrases in his site. While a pretty site is nice, a pretty site that is not optimized will not be effective. An effective website considers words first; design, photos, fonts, and colors are all secondary.
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