Understanding effective Internet marketing strategies is difficult at best and can be downright confusing at its worst.  There is just so much information (and let’s face it…misinformation) concerning Internet marketing techniques that it can be quite overwhelming.  One fairly easy way to increase website traffic is to simply rethink your website’s keywords.  By incorporating appropriate keywords and keyword phrases you can get a lot more mileage out of your search engine rankings.

The competition for search engine ranking is so fierce that it is necessary to put a little more creativity into your keyword phrases.  Instead of “mechanic”, think more along the lines of “auto mechanic in Chicago IL”.  Using your locale in your keyword phrases can go a long way in improving your website’s SERPs.  Not to mention its ability to drive targeted traffic that you can then convert to a customer.  After all, no one wants to hire a mechanic that is 100 miles away.

Your first step is to engage in some serious brainstorming.  Ask yourself how you would search for the products and services that you offer.  You can also ask yourself what kind of problems people are trying to solve and how they might need a company like yours.  Finally, it never hurts to check out the competition.  Go ahead and Google a top competitor and see where they rank, read their copy and try to understand how their keywords fit into the big picture.

An enormously easy and free tool to use for keyword research is Google’s Keyword Tool.  Once you’ve completed racking your brain for appropriate keywords and keyword phrases, you simply need to enter them into the Google Keyword Tool and it will spit out a list of suggested keywords that you can then export to CSV and import to your spreadsheet program.

Your spreadsheet will likely contain quite a few keywords that are not relevant, all of which you will want to delete to keep your keywords spreadsheet as targeted as possible.  I have no doubt that by performing a few simple keyword searches you will be surprised by the relevant keywords that you may have overlooked.

While these few steps may seem over-simplified, it is definitely a way for anyone interested in increasing their website traffic to jump start an SEO campaign.  Your new list of targeted keywords is exactly what you need to help determine the content of your site and reach your customers in the best way possible.

At corecubed, we specialize in Internet marketing and can help you develop a first-rate marketing plan.  We can design campaigns to include social media, email marketing, blogging or SEO (…and yes, that includes keyword research and integration!)  Contact us today.