Search Marketing: Romancing The Keyword

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Search Marketing: Romancing The Keyword

Keywords are the specially tagged words that bring you and your dream customer together online. Lest that sound like a simple and fairly traditional coupling, better to get clear right now that online, keyword matches are more of a ménage à trois. You, your prospect, and the search engine are all in this together. For anyone getting nervous, or anything else, that is the extent of that metaphor.

Here’s how keywords work and what you need to do about it:

Your customer uses keywords to search for information, answers, or solutions.
You use them to describe a solution or an answer to a problem–whatever it is you are promoting.

The more nearly you can match the keywords that you use to “answer” a question to the ones that your future customer uses to “ask” it, the more likely that you will be brought together by you-know-who.

That would be the third party–the search engine. You and the customer (the searcher) each make your keywords known to the search engine. The search engine’s job is to sort through billions of possibilities to find matches. Search engines are both generous and picky. They will deliver up as many matches as they can find; these often number in the millions. (Your goal is to get on page one of the results, and preferably in the top spot.) On the picky side, search engines are calibrated by the companies that own them, to screen out undesirable and irrelevant results so as to deliver only high-quality matches to the searcher. This is a good thing, but one that holds you–the marketer–to a high standard. (That’s your standard anyway, right?)

The search engine, it needs to be said, is only interested in satisfying the customer–that is, the searcher who enters her keywords and phrases into the little query box (think Google, Yahoo, YouTube, etc.) –not you (or me). We, as good marketers, must do three things extremely well then, in order to show up in the results that the search engine produces for our prospective customers:

1) anticipate the need/problem of the searcher and choose keywords that are highly likely to match the words–or at least the intention–of her query;
2) use these keywords in the titles, headlines, and/or subject lines of promotional materials (ad, article, video, email, blog post, etc.);
3) properly tag the keywords in terms and codes that the search engine will recognize. This is what makes it possible for the search engine to do its job for the customer.

Fortunately (for most of us!) the world is awash in geeks and so many of these tools that we use to produce ads, articles, videos, and such, have been made pretty user-friendly for non-geeks. The upshot–good news for Average-Joe-Marketer–is that by learning just a few tricks, we can accomplish what is needed with keywords, and function AS IF we actually understood what we were doing and how it all works.

What we do need to know, then, is:

HOW to research and select good keywords; WHERE to put them; and WHAT ELSE we can do to optimize search engine activity to increase the chances of being picked up and displayed on page one of the customer’s results.

I’ll go into more detail on each of those areas in upcoming articles.

Happy marketing!

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