Website Research For Small Business Websites

You have an existing business so why do you need to do research to decide what your website will be about?

If you are a plumber then its about plumbing .. OR!

Well yes and no. The first thing you have to ask is: Who is searching for plumbing, and secondly how many websites there are already on the subject of plumbing.

Why is this important? Well you need to target the keywords that the searchers are using to search for the services or products that you offer.

This is similar to getting your business listed in the yellow pages. You want it listed in the correct category. If your plumbing business gets listed under restaurants even if people do see it they will ignore it as they are looking for a restaurant and not a plumber.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is essential for getting your business found. You need to find the words and phrases people use to search for your services/products.

Once you know these you can build your web site around these phrases. It has two phases.

Finding the Keywords and selecting the best keywords.

Finding the Keywords

There are a number of keyword research tools you can use to help. I will concentrate on the free tools as they are most suitable for the small business owner, the professional tools are best left to the professionals.

The one I will use for illustration is the Free Wordtracker tool ,there is also the Yahoo tool (formally Overture tool)  here.

However before you can start using this tool you will need to start with list of seed keywords.

 So the first stage is to make a list of search phrases you think people would use when searching for the product/service you are offering.

Don't forget to think laterally as well. For example don't just list words like:

plumber, professional plumber, registered plumber

think of:

fix leaking tap, install shower, unblock drains

Once you have your own list you simply go to the tool and enter them. The tool will return a list of search phrases (that people actually used) along with the number of times they were searched (this is not accurate but a good gauge).

So let's do a quick example using plumbing. I entered the word plumbing into the too and this is what I got (only few results shown).

What you are looking for is for the search phrases used most often but not generic. i.e. plumbing is generic but plumbing supplies is not. You need to repeat this process for all the search phrases you originally thought of and any more that arise as you are researching.

Finally you will come with a list of 5 phrases ideally 2 to 3 words that you can target. You then need to choose the ones that most accurately describe your business products/services and that are easiest to target.

The ones that are easiest to target are the ones that have little strong competition. How do you find that? You simply go to Google and enter the search phrase in quotes.

I have done it below for the terms plumbing supplies and plumbing parts.

From the above you can see that plumbing parts has 349,000 competing sites plumbing supplies 1.5 million. Therefore the easiest one to target is plumbing parts.

Keyword research can be very time consuming but it is well worth the effort.