If you want to drive more paying customers to your website from the search engines (without paying for ads), then selecting the right commercially viable keywords is extremely important.

 

In this article we cover how to find the right keywords for your business in five simple steps:

Step 1: Brainstorm

The first step is to get yourself a cuppa, a large sheet of plain paper (or spreadsheet) then brainstorm and write down all the relevant words or phrases that people may search for when looking for your event, plus all the items you want to be found for. This may include:

Plus, anything else that may be relevant to your specific event.

Top Tip –this is the most important step as it defines all the important words relating to your business priorities, so plan to spend a good amount of time getting as many words and phrases down as possible.

1. Your brand names
2. The generic name for your type of show, such as ‘baby shows’
3. The location and venue of your shows, including any new locations you may be looking to target, such as ‘London, Olympia London, Birmingham, NEC’
4. Buying phrases people may use, such as ‘baby show tickets’
5. Specific products or services that people would expect to see at your show, plus items you are looking to promote such as: (a) ‘Prams’, ‘buggies’, ‘strollers’; (b) ‘Carriers’, ‘slings’; (c) ‘Baby sleep seminars’.
6. Informational questions people may have about: (a) The show, such as ‘where is the baby show’; (b) Associated products and services, such as ‘best prams’, ‘what type of baby carrier do I need’, ‘how do I get my baby to sleep'.

 

Step 2: Get other suggestions

Whilst your brainstorming will uncover many great terms there may be some that you’ve missed, and these can be found with:

• Google Suggest: type in a search in Google and you are shown other related, and possible relevant alternative keyword ideas.
• Competitor research: find the top keywords that your competitors are targeting with WordStreams free tool or a more comprehensive ‘paid for’ tool such as SE Ranking.

• Keyword tool ideas: software tools such as  Keyword Surfer (free Chrome plugin) or Keyword Keg (more advanced paid for tool) both generate lots of additional ideas for you to sift through and select.

Top Tip – don’t get overwhelmed with all the keyword suggestions that you may get (which is easily done), just list down the useful ones you think you may have missed during your brainstorm phase.

 

Step 3: Organise

You should now have plenty of potential keywords, but before you start finding the numbers of searches, its best to organise everything, better if into a spreadsheet.

Top Tip - if you organise as shown above this will make step 4 easier!

 

Step 4: Get a full list of keywords using Mergewords

Merge Words is a great free tool for combining all the possible keyword combinations, which in step 5 will be used to find search volumes.

 

Step 5: Find which keyword ideas have search volume and pay per click value

From your list of keywords in step 4, you now need to find the monthly search volume using a paid for tool like Keyword Keg, you can also find the pay per click (PPC) value which indicates the commercial viability of the keyword.

Top Tip – use the Keyword Finder tool in Keyword Keg to find associated relevant questions that you can either write about on the page, of have written an associated blog post about.

From this you can now pick the keywords with search volume and ideally some PPC value that you are going to target on your websites key pages, associated blogs, social posts, and press releases.

Now that you know your SEO keywords, you now need to define the pages that are going to target these. As a rule, you should target a closely related group of keywords per page, these may inform new pages that your website needs, for example,

• ‘compare prams’, ‘pram comparison’ and ‘how to compare prams’ would all be targeted on one page, and
• ‘baby products’, ‘best baby products’ and ‘compare baby products’ on another page

 

However, this is a lesson for another day, firstly you need to find your keywords!