Whether you have a  local ‘brick and mortar’ business or are strictly web-based you will want to use the Internet to obtain leads for your business. In order to do this you need to get traffic to your website. Many business often tell me ‘I want to be on page one for Google search’. This is a great goal to have, but the question I usually ask in treturn is ‘For what keywords’?

Many of us will put up a website and describe our products or services, features and benefits, portfolio, contact us page, testimonials/clients page and some of the more astute of us will even create a blog. But most of us have no idea what keywords we should be targeting and if we do we often don’t do the things that will get us ranked for those keywords.

1. Pick some keywords you would like to be ranked for and find related keywords – write down some keywords that you can think of for your market. Use the Google keyword tool to find related keywords
2. Find out if enough people are searching for them – look at search volumes for those keywords
3. Find out if these keywords have ‘commercial value’ – use the Google advertising rates to determine which keywords are worth more to existing businesses
4. Analyze the competition – find out how many webpages you’re competing with, and how strongly they are ranked based on a variety of factors (domain age, backlinks, HTML tags, etc). See where the weaknesses are and where you can get ranked more easily.
5. Choose the optimum keywords and get ranked for them – start a campaign using these optimal keywords (fairly high number of searches but reasonable competition), getting backlinks to your webpages from other websites (via articles, videos, social networks), and so on
6. Create a local Google business listing – a little known feature of Google! By creating a local listing for your business, you can often get on page on very quickly, and your business will be located on a Google map in the search results making it easy to find.

This can be done manually by using software such as the free Google keyword tool, but I use a powerful software tool called Market Samurai that integrates everything into one package and speeds up the process tremendously, especially for competitive analysis which can be tedious. For more information and assistance you can contact me.