One of the most important things to understand about keywords and how they relate to your business is that you should always start off by targeting very specific and detailed phrases which describe your ideal prospects.

This is because it helps you attract people that are looking exactly for what you have to offer, which will in turn make it much easier to close a sale and give them what they want.

Using what’s called Long Tail Keywords, which are basically words or phrases that are made up of more than 3 words, you will be able to bring in more targeted and qualified traffic to your website.

Another benefit to working with long tail instead of short keyword phrases is that they are usually much cheaper to advertise with and have less competition when it comes to SEO and getting your site to rank for the terms.

We’ll use “Guitar Lessons” as our example niche again. If I decide to try and advertise on the keyword “guitar lessons”, I will most likely find that it’s going to cost me more per click (pay per click advertising will be discussed in the near future) and I will be getting a very broad range of people to my website.  The other harsh side of working with short keywords is that they are almost always impossible to rank for using SEO.  It would most likely take years and tons of work to get my website ranked in the search engines for the term “guitar lessons”.

Let’s dig a little deeper into our example…

The product that I have teaches beginners how to play rock music. So you can imagine that if a person came to my site looking for “guitar lessons” and they are interested in learning acoustic folk guitar, then I have a pretty slim chance of making a sale.

So the smart thing to do would be to target the keyword phrase “beginner rock guitar lessons”.  You can instantly see how if someone typed that phrase into Google and my website showed up right in front of them, then I would have a much higher chance of selling them my product.

Of course there is going to be a much smaller amount of traffic available with long tail keywords but again, it’s going to be highly targeted and ultra focused on your ideal prospect.

The best thing to do for your business, product or service is to write down a list of all the terms and phrases that people would most likely type in to a search engine to find what you have to offer.  Then dig deeper and add words that describe specific aspects to what you have to offer.  Are you just a “doctor” or are you a “children’s dentist in New York City”. Are you a lawyer or do you specialize in bankruptcy law in Los Angeles California?

It doesn’t always have to be region specific but I’m sure you get the point.

In the next article were going to talk about researching your keywords so that we can get an idea of: how many people are searching on the terms and how much competition exists for SEO and getting your site ranked for the specific terms.

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