Keywords are an important part of marketing your business online in Los Angeles.
The objective of keywords usage is to help prospects find your website and contact you.
As the founder of the SIP association notes, “Your website is your company. So if they can’t find what they are looking for, it means you don’t have it.”
Luckily for small business owners like us, we can use them to our advantage to help match our customers with the content they’re looking for.
Local Keyword Research
In order to make your website known, you need to deliberately practice and include keyword strategies.
This involves research and taking crucial steps that would help your potential customers find you on the internet more readily.
Keyword research is about coming up with a list of keywords and phrases related to what you do.
This way your website pages are ‘optimized’. People use keywords for searching products and services on the internet similar to the ones your business sells, and these are the same keywords that you have used on your website.
Always take into consideration how someone would search for your business in LA.
Actionable Tip: You can use a helpful free tool like seedkeywords.com.
You can type in a search scenario such as my example below, ‘you’re looking for a restaurant in LA’.
You can also make it as specific as you need, for example if you have a vegan restaurant you can change it to ‘you’re looking for a vegan restaurant in LA’.
Keyword Insertion
Now that you have a list of keywords, and probably phrases related to those keywords, it is time to put them into action!
Strategically place your keywords where they make sense. Make use of headers and place them into your content where it sounds as natural as possible.
Don’t disturb the style, meaning, tone or theme of the content.
If forcing the keywords changes the whole meaning of what you want to convey, just don’t do it. Let the content be in its best form, and concentrate fully on sounding like a person talking to fellow beings, not like a robot.
As for the choice of keywords, this is a direct result of the research you did as noted above.
For instance, if Bill is a freelance editor and your research shows ‘internet consultant in LA’ to be what people search for the most, use ‘internet consultant’ to describe Bill.
A more general example would be, if you run a content writing business that offers marketing services for online eCommerce websites, then instead of writing “contact us to craft your landing pages and drive your traffic through the roof”, write as “contact us to create your landing pages and drive your traffic through the roof”, because people use ‘create’ more often than ‘craft’.
Additionally, if you come across phrases that are commonly used for searches and closely related to your business, don’t hesitate to add them somewhere inside the content.
The bottom line is: Anytime and anywhere you can replace non-keyword phrase with a keyword-phrase without altering the meaning, you certainly should.
So, if ‘online copy-writing’ is a popular phrase of your keyword research, then “contact internet consultant Bill for all your online copy-writing needs” will do more good than Bill can imagine.
Keyword Optimization
The idea of listing keywords and phrases that really reflect what you do is to differentiate yourself from the crowd.
There may be hundreds of businesses like yours, so you want to make sure that your website is being pulled up on the first or second page of the search engine results whenever a customer queries the item or service that you offer.
Seems simple, right? Not really, because there are many factors that play their unique role in order to accomplish this task.
Once you insert relevant keywords, the search engine algorithms match up with those keywords and bring up the results.
Using keywords and phrases in marketing and advertising is equally important if you want the algorithms to pay attention to your website.
Take a Second
It’s important to take a second to remember that it’s in everyone’s best interest to show the best results for searches.
For Google of course, the better their results are, the more ads they can sell.
If you’re doing a search, you don’t want to waste your time doing multiple searches.
Ask yourself if your page matches up with the search intent as closely as it can and whether you would be happy with that search result.
Keywords need to be optimized, in the sense, they should be ‘fine-tuned’ to customers’ searches.
For example, let’s say you are a business selling exercise equipment and Cathy, (soon-to-be your loyal customer) is gearing up for her wedding and wants to make sure that she is at her ideal weight.
She has just started looking for treadmills and other exercise machines that will help her lose weight at a faster rate.
As a business with a stockpile of treadmills, you will understand Cathy’s thought process and determine every keyword she is most likely to type into that Google search box.
Incorporating variety of exercise machine names is how you are going to ensure that the search engine shows your website at the top for Cathy to see, and click.
Pay-Per-Click Ads & Keywords
Once your website is up and optimized, advertising it on the internet may give you the extra boost you need.
You want to be found easily so you can attract customers and make sales.
Pay-per-click (PPC) ads are how you do it; you can put them anywhere on the internet that is relevant to your business or keywords used.
Customers come across your ads because they did a search using the same keywords you used in the content of your website. They see ads on social media websites because the searches are keyed to their indicated interests.
PPC ads can be created anywhere; you only pay when prospects click on the ad link that redirects to your landing page. If you have used keywords efficiently, leverage it strategically, then you are bound to get a lot of attention, clicks, and eventually, sales.
Otherwise, it’s time to revisit those strategies and make a more thorough review of your marketing campaigns.
Additionally, most people will be surfing on the internet during a specific time of the day, like early in the morning or evening.
You may want to use a different approach of marketing through PPC for the morning crowd, like text messages.
Use video ads for the evening crowd where people are more likely to sit, relax and watch.
Your strategy may vary here depending on the type of business you have in LA.
Keyword Placements
Placing keywords in highly visible areas is how you attract maximum number of people to your business.
Your homepage is where customers begin their exploration of your business, so include the right keywords and phrases on the home page.
Make sure that they fit the content of what you put on the site.
You’ll also want to make sure you aren’t running into keyword cannibalization, meaning that you have pages that are competing for keywords.
Make each page unique and helpful whether it’s a category page, homepage or a blog post.
