Business Website Advice

It all starts – with keyword search phrases. Do you know yours?
Your website planning, your writing…everything to do with your website starts with choosing the right ‘keyword search phrases’.  Help is here to get them right.

Customised site for the wrong search phrase is sad news
A common error is to have a website built around the wrong phrases.  Often a site gets built around a phrase the owner feels the customer should use, instead of the search phrase they really do use.

Unintended ignorance
Yes, this happens often because customers don’t have the inside knowledge, the expertise and lingo that the owner has.  Think about it.  Within the home sound system industry, an audio engineer knows the difference between distributed sound and surround sound.  The customer may never have heard of one so only uses what they know. 

A customer might search for ‘breaking a will’ instead of ‘contesting a will.’ It’s another case of a customer using the wrong search phrase (in all their unintended ignorance of the right terms). The searcher uses common lingo instead of the precise term the professional knows by heart.  As you read this you can probably think of several more examples.  Why not post a comment? We can all learn from you.

Insider jargon
I remember when I first started working with tourism websites, I  was surprised when some  B & B owners called themselves “hosted accommodations’.  That’s fine when talking with other accommodation folks, but not when talking with customers outside tourism.  Believe me, no customer searches for ‘hosted accommodation’ when planning a holiday. 

Case study on the wrong way
I was guilty on our first company website in 1996, before tools were available to check on what searchers really use when hunting for your particular product.

My audio engineer husband knew too much. He had designed and patented a wee little speaker and I had designed a website to sell it on.  He knew the correct audio engineer’s phrase would be to describe it as a near field monitor. 

No end user called it that, no one searched for that phrase.  Every musician we ever did a demo for called it a stage monitor even though it never touched the floor, it clamped onto a mic stand. 

The customer is always right.  When we used stage monitor phrase on the website, our stats proved the customer was always right.  Traffic was good. A stage monitor it was.

Today’s lesson - verify that the phrases you think should be used are really the phrases the searchers use. 

Research tools to do the job for free will be discussed in a future post.

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