Picking Powerful Keywords

I was talking with a client the other day who wanted to have his site rank well in the search engines. (I’ve changed the details of this story a tad to protect the client’s privacy.) Let’s say the client is a company with annual revenues in the millions of dollars (as indeed this client is), in the business of, oh, I dunno . . . staging rodent-racing events.

I did a little research and found that most people searching for rodent-racing events use the keywords rodent racing. (Big surprise, huh?) I took a look at the client’s Web site and discovered that the words rodent racing didn’t appear anywhere on the site’s Web pages.

“You have a little problem,” I said. “Your site doesn’t use the words rodent racing, so it’s unlikely that any search engine will find your site when people search for that.”

“Oh, well,” was the client’s reply, “our marketing department objects to the term. We have a company policy to use the term furry friend events. The term rodent is too demeaning, and if we say we’re racing them, the animal-rights people will get upset.”

This is a true story, well, except for the bit about rodent racing and the furry friends thing. But in principle it happened. This company had a policy not to use the words that most of its potential clients were using to search for it.

You may be asking yourself how it’s possible that a company can build a Web site only to discover later that the keywords its potential clients and visitors are using are not in the site. Well, I can think of a couple of reasons:
 Most sites are built without any regard for the search engines. The site designers simply don’t think about the search engines or have little background knowledge about how search engines work.
 The site designers do think about the search engines, but they guess, often incorrectly, what keywords they should be using.

I can’t tell you how the client and I resolved this problem because, well, we haven’t yet resolved it. But I am going to tell you how to pick keywords that make sense for your site, as well as how to discover what keywords your potential site visitors are using to search for your products and services.