Last updated on April 13th, 2015 at 02:08 pm

This was a comment made to me the other day by someone I was talking to – they were proud of the fact that they were at the top of Google for a phrase that had millions of results.  However they were a bit concerned that their website stats shows that they didn’t have any visitors for that phrase, and in fact their website wasn’t getting very many visitors at all.

When I asked who had done their keyword research for them (of if they had done it themselves) the person I was talking to looked at me blankly and said “keyword research?”.

I had to explain that part of a successful internet campaign (or search engine optimisation [SEO] campaign) is targeting the phrases that people are searching for (in marketing speak it’s called targeting pre-qualified visitors).  There are many ways to do this, including :-

• Sitting down and thinking about what people would search for.  This is normally a starting point as you often don’t know what the man in the street would search for and you would tend to use jargon.
• Asking colleagues what they would search for.  Again, this is a starting point but remember that they would also tend to use jargon.
• Asking family or friends what they would search for to find your products or services.  A better idea as these people are one step removed from your business and are closer to the average searcher.
• Look at some of the tools available that tell you what people are searching for.  For example the Google keyword tool can be used to give you ideas of phrases and an idea of the number of searches made for each of them

If you do use one of the tools though you need to remember that the figures showing the number of searches are not accurate (if they say that there are 21,000 searches on for a phrase doesn’t mean that there are actually 21,000 searches but that there are about twice as many searches for a search that has 10,000 searches).

The idea of carrying out keyword research is that you are trying to attract people that are searching on the internet for the product or services that you provide.  If you do this, and have good positions in the search engines you should find that you are getting traffic to your website, reducing the bounce rate on your website and even better that you are getting enquiries or making sales from your website.