Assume for a moment that you’re a small firm of accountants. Needless to say, you (and your website) are competing in a very, very crowded market. In that circumstance, and to ensure that your website will show up in the organic listings, one of the first things you should do is identify your keywords and key phrases and populate your home page with them.
Your initial response might be to optimise your site for the keyword ‘Accountants’. But you soon discover that thousands of your fellow accountants have already captured ownership of that property many moons ago! OK, so you take that one on the chin and turn to Google’s Keyword Tool for inspiration. You enter the word ‘accountants’ and this is what you get: accounting, accountancy, accountant jobs, accountants chartered, chartered accountants, accounting services...The list goes on and on, but it actually takes you nowhere; try it and you’ll see what I mean. So having gone precisely nowhere, where precisely next?
Remember that the most effective keywords and phrases are those that your prospective clients and customer would use to find the service you’re selling. Also keep in mind that more and more Internet users are realising that the more specific the search term, the better the chance of finding what they’re looking for. On that basis, ownership of the keyword ‘Accountant’ may be not be the holy grail, given the number of results that entering such a bald and unrefined search in Google would generate – 31,000,000+ as of 1 November 2009.
Time to start seeing the wood for the trees and being as specific as you can be.
The first thing to do is to look at your business dispassionately and identify what distances you from your competitors. Is there a certain skill or sector that you excel in? I’m not thinking about accountants who can audit accounts, or handle tax returns. I have in mind those specialities that are not easy to find – e.g., accountants specialising in advising ‘retired people’. And what about location? Is it conceivable that your region, county, city, town or Postcode could figure in a search term – i.e., accountant, south west, accountant, Somerset, or accountant Bath? Are you ‘inexpensive’? Do you offer an Inheritance Tax Planning service? They are all potential points of difference between you and your competition and it’s those points of difference that your potential clients are looking for.
Taking the above possibilities, our hypothetical accountant’s ideal hypothetical prospect would therefore enter the following keywords/search terms to find the accountant he or she wants to meet:
You then have to reciprocate by scattering those keywords throughout your site as well as formulating an all-encompassing keyword phrase along the lines of “ABC - a firm of inexpensive accountants, based in Bath, Somerset, specialising in advising retired people living in the south west on Inheritance Tax solutions” somewhere on the home page of your website.
It will take time, but having unearthed your real keywords and key phrases - and planted them on your home page - your website will, after a while, begin to be found by the people who are looking for it. And to my mind, that’s what ’it’ is all about.
