Whether you are running a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign with Google or looking to optimize your website, choosing the right keywords for your website is the key to success. Simply choosing the terms with the highest search volume is not always the best strategy. Rather, I suggest finding a niche market. Similar to offline marketing, niche marketing can be a very successful strategy online. Targeting a particular audience with more specific terms can lead to less competition and, in turn, quicker results.

Here are some tips when choosing your keywords:
• Analyze your competition. Know what keywords your competitors are using on their website and in PPC campaigns.
• Know what people are searching. Google offers a free keyword suggestion tool that provides you with access to historical search behavior. This tool can help you determine which keywords are searched the most and suggest other that you may not have thought about.
• Be as specific as possible. The more targeted you can get with your keywords, the less competition you will face. Don’t narrow your keywords down so much that there is no search volume, but find a good balance between the amount of traffic and the relevance of your website to potential searchers.

If you have a website and have never spent time analyzing your keywords, you might be losing out on potential online business. Don’t have time to do this yourself? We can do it for you! Contact Sanderson Marketing for a free consultation.

Sanderson Marketing becomes one of the more than 1,200 members of the Greater Killeen Chamber of Commerce.  As a member, Sanderson Marketing hopes to expand our network of local clients and introduce our services to the many business owners in the Killeen, Fort Hood, Copperas Cove, and Harker Heights areas.

As a local website design and print marketing company, our personalized service allows us to work with each client individually to develop a unique marketing plan.  We hope that Greater Killeen area businesses will consider Sanderson Marketing for all of the web and print needs.

Visit www.SandersonMarketing.com for more information about our website design and print marketing services.

If you are on a limited marketing budget, only spend money on advertising that you can track and quantify. While branding techniques that “get your name out” are beneficial, it usually takes longer to see a significant amount of sales from this type of marketing. When your budget is limited, it is more important to spend money on advertising that will generate immediate results that you can attribute back to the dollars you spent.

Whether you are on a tight budget or not, niche marketing can be a very cost effective strategy. Rather than trying to appeal to everyone, tightening your focus allows you to appear even stronger to the ones you do reach. Find a specialty within your market that your competition hasn’t picked up on and go after those potential buyers with your entire marketing budget.

Consider going green with your marketing. Sending postcards can be pricy especially compared to email marketing. There are some rules to follow when sending email marketing (to be discussed in a future monthly email), but once you have a well established list of email addresses, this method will cost you hundreds maybe thousands less.

When choosing an advertising source, consider “reach” and “frequency”. How many people will my message reach and how frequently will they be exposed. When choosing one advertising method over another, pick the one that gets you in front of more potential customers more frequently.

Build a strong reputation in your market. Word of mouth referrals are the best means of marketing. Not only do they come without actually spending money on a marketing campaign, the leads you receive are usually much easier to turn into sales. Take good care of your current customers and hopefully they will reward you by telling their friends and family.

Many website owners ask me, “How do I get my website to the top of the search engines for my keywords?” The answer is not quite as easy as it may seem. If you’ve asked me this question, then you’ve heard me ramble on about all of the factors that go into search engine rankings. The truth is, there is not an easy step-by-step process that will absolutely bump you up to #1 in Google. (Or, trust me, I would have unveiled that secret to you all a long time ago). In a cyber-world where there are millions and millions of websites, Google, Yahoo and the other search engines have developed a top secret algorithm to best rank websites in order of importance for any given keyword.

What makes answering the question so difficult is that these search engines don’t publish what their algorithm is. It makes sense… if people knew the algorithm, they could make their website appear at the top for any search term they chose. Inevitably, the system would be abused and irrelevant information would appear in your searches. It is because the search engines deliver relevant information that we continue to use them as a resource when we want to find something.

There are a few parts to the puzzle that we know play a role in how the search engines determine if your website is relevant for any given keywords. How much of a roll? This is what the search engines won’t tell us. And to make it more complicated, they constantly change this formula so that people don’t catch on. Some of these factors include:
• Quality content on your website
• Links from other websites to your website
• Links from your website to other relevant websites
• Amount of traffic on your website
• Metatags, title tags, and alt text
• Listing in prominent online directories
• Choosing the right keywords
• Domain name and its age
• Organization and layout of content
• Variety and percentage of document changes
• Website size

If you do a Google search for keywords that pertain to your business, you may find over a million results. If you think about millions websites out there all vying for that first page position, you start to understand the complexity of search engine optimization.

For more information about search engine optimization, contact Sanderson Marketing.