(815) 503-0286 matt@matthewlbrennan.com

Maybe you’ve taken the time to build a web site that you are extremely happy with. Maybe someone else built it for you, and the graphics and design are beautiful and spectacular.

Great. Now what? Well, it needs to be findable. This means thought and effort need to go into selecting keywords. First, you need to think like a customer. What are they going to search you under? Write down the first five or so words or phrases you may think they’ll look for you under.

Now, you need to do your keyword research. Find the Google keyword tool, and type those phrases in. What the tool does from here is tell you how competitive those search phrases are, and how many global searches there are.

From here, you are walking a line. You want a low to medium competition rate, with a high level of searches. This means that there are not as many sites trying to rank with these words, and there are plenty of searches for them.

These are the keywords that truly have the potential to benefit your marketing efforts. Use them in your keyword meta data. Make sure that the keywords that mean the most to you appear at least one to two times in your copy.

From there, wait, and monitor the results in your Google Analytics. Hopefully, you should start to see the results from there. You can see how long the visitors who used that keyword remain on your site. If you’re not getting the results you hoped for, adjustments can always be made.

If you find the most relevant keywords, and use them correctly, your marketing efforts should become a lot easier from there.

Matt Brennan is a Chicago-area marketing writer and copy editor. He is also the author of Write Right-Sell Now.