Let’s start with my belief:  The web, and digital, wins.

Marketing, sales, PR and customer service are increasingly dominated (OK, “influenced”) by email, social, and websites. Customers do research about products/services before they choose a vendor, let alone trust you enough to make contact and ultimately become an online lead or sale.

Information is easy to find. Will you "get found" and become a  trusted source of information before the purchase is made?

So sure, you have a website, you use email, you have social media accounts, and maybe you have a blog (you probably should) and/or dabble in Pay Per Click (PPC)?

But, what is your quantifiable return on investment? 

If you don’t take sales that can be attributed to internet tools seriously enough to have a coherent strategy (and you are reading this!?) then …well… uh… good luck. Having said that, keywords are the first basic building block of ANY internet marketing and sales strategy. 

So first, create a clear online marketing strategy for how you will use website, blog, email, and social media TOGETHER, to accomplish a measurable goal that will benefit your business. 

If  your approach is something like; “If we build it they will come” ..., again, good luck.

No measurable goal?  No shared strategy?   You are leaving money on the table… or throwing it away.

If it doesn’t make dollars, it doesn’t make sense. So AT LEAST put together a hypothesis, or theory, or shared idea that looks like this:

If we do “X”,  it will cause “Y” to happen, and that will be worth “$$”.

Customers search using words. What words?

Will they find YOUR business with those words? Figure out what your customer’s keywords are.

This is where real work begins.

It’s best accomplished by a team of individuals including customer facing employees from the sales and/or customer service departments.  If you can, try to include real living, breathing (paying) customers too. Also, include an internet marketing professional mature enough to lead you through figuring out short and long tail keyword phrases.

Ask yourself:  What words do customers use to search for and find information about our product or service?  

Make a long list – say “hundreds” of words long.

Concentrate on two, three and four word phrases.

Forget about your company name. If you don’t already get found online easily for your name…. that’s a different problem. Go back to “Have a strategy….”

And then…

Make sure your internet marketing pro can tell you these two things: 

-       How often is each keyword phrase used in search?

-       How competitive is it to rank for each phrase?     

And you might need to weed out some common industry insider jargon that’s familiar to you, but that customers don’t often use.

Figure out what keywords you can reasonably rank for.

Use your list of words, the amount they are searched, and the level of ranking competition, to decide which ones to target. This will also be a function of your budget and commitment. There’s no shame in having a modest budget. But if that’s the case, make sure your pro has enough experience to help you make business judgments about what is reasonably possible for ROI with the budget allotted.

Usually that is connected directly (again!) to real measurable goals.

Consider doing some paid “pay-per-click” advertising.

Running a PPC campaign does some very useful things. First, it gets you website traffic immediately. And remember: It’s pay per click. If they don’t click to your site, you don’t pay.

When prospects come to your site after searching and clicking on your PPC ads, your analytics can tell you lots of strategically important stuff!

It tells you what words people are actually actively searching for and clicking on. Equally important, it tells you IF visitors will do what you want them to do on your site. 

Perhaps more important:  It forces and starts the budget consideration: If a click to your site cost “X” dollars… how many of those clicks do you need to sell “Y” worth of products or services?

It tells you if your site actually “sells”. It indicates if your online business model will “work” as currently configured.  That’s strategic thinking you must get right.

Comparing the cost of a click to your site, against the value of a sale or lead that you get from that click, tells you tons about how “the finance” and ROI might work. It’s a crucial input to your strategy. More on that in later blog posts. But suffice it to say, real internet marketing “pros” (that’s us) who you would want as a “business partner,” will know to start on this issue. 

Keyword strategy is the place to start.

Most marketers really don’t “do” comprehensive internet marketing following any kind of proven methodology that would capture leads.  Everyone will tell you they understand keywords.  And they will talk about best practices. But “best practices” don’t apply to every business model, category, and situation. Internet marketing is ALWAYS custom work.

Make sure you have access to a knowledgeable pro.

You need marketing experience. You need internet and inbound marketing experience. You need business experience and savvy. And you need good judgment and honesty. We can assume you know YOUR business well enough to be a full player. Make sure you have a quality internet marketing pro somewhere in the picture.

Getting keywords right is a valuable long term investment. 

Getting keywords right is like a valuable annuity. Make the investment.

Getting keywords right is like building assets for the future.

Getting keywords right is essential to ANY effective online marketing and sales strategy.

Use your words. Get leads online.

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