We’ve all done it – we Google ourselves to try and see what information comes up, or where our business website appears in search results. That’s good! It can help you to position yourself. But are you searching for the same terms a client will search for? Are you searching for both the specialization AND the location you serve? If you are that’s great, as it gives you a more realistic diagnostic of how effectively your Search Engine Optimization is working for you! — but now – do the pages on your website reflect the information gained from your searches?

The goal of our Search Engine Optimization is to make sure your site gets seen by people who might be interested in your services. This may seem obvious, but often when considering Search Engine Optimization, we forget the “people who might be interested in your services” component. If you are providing health care in New York City, you ideally want visitors to your site who are looking for health care in New York City, and surrounding areas.

One way to accomplish this is through well placed keywords. Ensuring that you “target” the keywords you use on your site can be a crucial step in the Search Engine Optimization process. By picking the right keywords for your area and your specialties, you can not only raise your online visibility, but bring in more potential clients! First, I’ll demonstrate how targeted keywords produce better search results, than I’ll show you how to take advantage of targeted key phrases in your SEO.”

I recently moved down to Berkeley, CA from Oregon, and realized that I had left my favorite running shoes at my old house! I knew that I could go on one of the many popular online shoe stores available, but I still prefer to try shoes on in a shop to make sure that they fit well. I went to Google and searched for “Shoes,” only to discover that there were over one billion results!

I quickly realized that I was going to have to focus my search if I were going to find any actual shoes. Not only were there too many options (even if I wanted to go through 0.01% of the results!), but I also quickly noticed that sites were popping up for everything related to shoes: stores, fashion, design, etc.

While these results were interesting, I really was only concerned about finding shoe stores! Therefore, the first step to focusing my search was to change the search from the general “Shoes” to “Shoe stores.” The addition of this one word immediately reduced my search from over a billion, to just over eighteen million results!

Better, but there is a good chance I was still missing out on something. The results here are going to be shoe stores across the country, and even the world. I was interested specifically shoe stores in the San Francisco bay area.

I could easily stop there, but because I am primarily interested in finding running shoes, I decided that it might be wise to include that in the search terms, to find stores that specifically specialize in athletic shoes.

There we go. From the original search for “Shoes” that came back with over one billion results, I am now down to under 500,000!

While this example is a little goofy, it demonstrates how a potential client might find your website, starting with the broadest terms, and refining from there. Keywords with a greater degree of specificity are more useful both to you as a website owner, and to the individual browsing the web.

What are targeted keywords?

Targeted keywords are words or phrases that include more information than the most general possible phrasing, “targeted” to what a user is actually searching for. In the above example the generic “shoes” was not targeted, but each subsequent search incorporated a more refined targeting.

Why are targeted keywords important for me, and how can we use them?

At this point, you may be saying, “Chris, that is great information, and I can see how a user might want to incorporate more targeted keywords when searching the internet, but how does this help me, the website owner?” Targeted keywords are critical to successful Search Engine Optimization because they allow you to directly connect with an audience that is searching for you, your location and your specialties.

A properly optimized website for a shoe store in Berkeley may not come up in the first page (or first ten pages!) in a Google search for the term “shoes.” It will, however, be highly ranked when doing a targeted search for the relevant terms (e.g., “Berkeley Shoe Store,” “Bay Area Shoes”).

The easiest way to incorporate these targeted keywords into your site, is to directly include them in page content (or sidebar) itself. As the owner of a shoe store in Berkeley, I would make sure that my site prominently mentioned that we proudly served Berkeley, and the greater Bay Area. Such information is helpful not only to human visitors who are looking for more information regarding your practice, but also the machines who are determining where to place your site in their search results!

These are just a couple of ways to incorporate targeted keywords into your website design. By focusing on keywords that both target your locality and your specialties, you can help drive not only more traffic to your site, but also “better” traffic—that is, clients in your area, who are more likely to contact you! Expect further blog articles from us in the coming weeks documenting additional ways to utilize targeted keywords, and other Search Engine Optimization practices. If you have any questions about how to specifically integrate targeted keywords onto your CoachingWebsites site, just send us an email, or give us a call, and any of our Search Engine Optimization technicians would be happy to help!

Chris C – CoachingWebsites Support and SEO
Email any questions to [email protected]