The most effective strategy to obtain your keywords is the free Google AdWords Keyword Tool. This was obviously developed by Google, and it can tell you the best traffic on certain keywords. You should create an account for yourself at adwords.google.com. You don’t have to pay anything here unless you put a campaign online. You are still able to access the keyword tool without an account.

What about the other search engines? In Australia, Google totally dominates—to the extent that the others are irrelevant. In fact, we have started calling it GO for Google Optimisation, and not SEO!

When starting with the tool, just follow these few steps:

All you have to do is input the terms that you think are relevant to your company and click the ‘Get keyword ideas’ button. You should also make sure that you target English, Australia, as most people searching in Australia search from Australian IP Addresses or use www.google.com.au.

If you keep churning through keyword ideas you should come up with some logical words that will correctly target your company. You must think laterally to develop words that are correct and accurate for your small business internet marketing. For example, if you were in ‘business coaching’, then you would not compete on high traffic words like ‘corporate consulting’. While you think that this is relevant, you must realize that even lead creation are corporate consultants – in fact, every man and his dog are corporate small business marketing consultants these days.

A Worked Example of How to Find Keywords

For the purposes of this example – explaining how to locate your keywords, let’s pretend your small business is in the Managed Print Service industry and trying to target a specific niche market in Australia.

After going into Google AdWords, you would begin by:

Inputting and Outputting Data

To begin searching for ideas, type your initial keyword thoughts into the keyword form (click the radial button ‘Descriptive words or phrases’ then enter keywords into the form). For your first keywords you should simply think about what the company does. These keywords should be the simplest form of the word possible. The keywords I’m going to try are:

• Manage print service
• Manage print software
• Print solution
• Print cost
• Print company Sydney
• Photocopy service
• Print management

It is best to write one keyword at a time and output them separately as then you can distinguish why Google has recommended these certain keyword ideas.

Below you can see where I have typed in the keyword and formulated the ideas.

As you run each of your ideas through the tool, you want to have them sorted by Local Search Volume: Month this is because it is the relevant data for Australia. You should also export all ideas to excel using the Download all keywords: .csv (for excel) link in the bottom right corner of the output.

The data that you are outputting will be completely raw and untargeted. Now you must read each and every individual line of that data and decide what searches would be relevant to find the company you are doing this for. It is worth it! Finding your keywords allows you to generate leads online effectively.

For instance, your output from ‘print solution’ has come up with about 50 keywords that are not relevant for your search. You should then just remove this data from your spreadsheet. Although some of this data may be useful later for when you’re doing an AdWords campaign (a great small business internet marketing idea), it is not hard to regenerate the search based on the results of your spreadsheet.

Once you have output all data into excel (and have about 10 excel windows open) and have deleted irrelevant outputs, you want to combine all data into the one spreadsheet. The output for your words is shown below.

Remember that this data should always be relevant. Percentages should be displayed as percentages. Data with no value is useless.

To Clarify:

Now would be a good time for me to explain exactly what this data represents and how it is useful for small business marketing. Remember that all data output by the AdWords Keyword Tool is approximate.

CPC and Competition is only used here as a point of reference. This data refers only to Google AdWords and not to SEO or Google Search. You can however assume that if there is a competition of 100% on a keyword, then that keyword is also likely heavily optimized.

The data that we are interested in is the traffic. Generally a high traffic keyword would be best if the competition was low, but it is extremely rare that you will find such a keyword; so there is a technique to get around this.

The Next Step is to Extend Your Words

Looking at the table shown above, you will see that the keyword ‘printing cost’ has traffic of 1900. This means that as a broad search people have searched for ‘…printing …cost…’ This may be in the form of ‘printing cost’ or it may also be in the form of ‘printing cost per page’, which you can see has traffic of 73. Another search could even be ‘what would printing be these days if there was no cost involved’. As long as the search contains these two words, it contributes to this traffic. By optimizing for ‘printing cost per page’ you are also optimizing for ‘printing cost’, but you must not add the traffic as the traffic for the ‘per page’ search is already calculated in the ‘printing cost’ search.

On the other hand however, you will see that the term ‘print solutions’ has traffic of 1900 and ‘print solution’ only has traffic of 320. This is generally rare, but in this case it simply means that the plural has been searched more. By optimizing for one or the other, you will be optimizing for both. You must take this into account when calculating your traffic.

Now using this search we want to find more words that are similar to the ones found already. We will look at the word ‘print management’ to try to find out what other broad searches make up the traffic in that search.

First we use our keyword tool to find suggestions around ‘print management’. Now, from our output we can find all terms that contain the keyword ‘print management’ (using the Ctrl-F function and ‘find all’ is easiest).

Putting these into a separate sheet we find:

You can see that 634 of the searches are accounted for by the words that are suggested. There are probably another 1000 searches on top of this that have too negligible data to show. The purpose of this output was to find another keyword that has much less competition with high traffic. While ‘print management software’ is probably the best result shown, traffic of 170 is still negligible. Hence our results are inconclusive. Although, what we have found is that the search ‘print management’ is correctly targeted considering most other searches below it are useful.

Keyword Extensions

Remember everybody searches Google in different ways. Some people search by typing in brand or product names, others search by typing questions, whole sentences, or even by using local slang or jargon. What we must realise is that the way we search will be different to another person’s, so we need to consider these other variables when targeting keywords. Also consider people who search with spelling mistakes. You have to think of all these things if you want to generate leads online.

There are several ways we can extend and increase variables in our keyword list:
• An online thesaurus
• Keyword Content Tool Generator
• Searching Google for suggestions

Thesaurus:

Insert your selected word into thesaurus.com to find other meanings. For this example we will use the keyword print management.
To use the thesaurus correctly we need to simplify any extended or plural words.

e.g. “management” would become “manage “decided” would become “decide”

MANAGE
Main Entry: manage Part of Speech: verb Definition: be in charge, control Synonyms: administer, advocate, boss, call the shots*, call upon, captain, care for, carry on, command, concert, conduct, counsel, designate, direct, disburse, dominate, engage in, engineer, execute, govern, guide, handle, head, hold down*, influence, instruct, maintain, manipulate, minister, officiate, operate, oversee, pilot, ply, preside, regulate, request, rule, run, run the show, steer, superintend, supervise, take care of, take over, take the helm, train, use, watch, watch over, wield Antonyms: bumble, mismanage

Select any relevant word that associate and make sense with our subject matter.

For this example we could use ‘maintain’. We then extend the word to become maintenance and include the previous keyword PRINT. Thus Print Management becomes Print Maintenance

We then insert the word Print Maintenance into the Google AdWords word tool generator to view the results. Our results will include the previous data of CPC, Competition, Local search volumes and Global search volume. From this data we can assess if Print Maintenance is a good keyword. Your small business internet marketing would then fairly frequently include this word.

You can use this process any number of times to determine the best keywords for your site. Once you have discovered your specific master keywords…then the fun starts. You can start embedding them in your website copy and in your metadata and watch your Google search results ranking skyrocket. And what does more traffic equal? More potential clients finding your website and discovering your services. This is innovation marketing for small business. We will also guarantee that if you correctly optimise your website using these keywords, your webpage will quickly climb up the ranks.