The right keywords greatly influence the success of your website. Therefore, keyword research is an essential high-return activity that can’t be ignored.

Learning keyword demand in your market helps you learn not only what terms and phrases to use, but it also makes it easier to understand your customers and their unique needs. Remember that it’s not necessarily bringing the most visitors to your site as it is about bringing the right visitors to your site.

Keyword research can also help you:

• Predict any shifts in demand
• Respond faster to changes in the market

How Valuable is Keyword Research?

It’s the difference between low rankings and a below average number of visitors and high rankings and higher traffic. Take, for example, a drug rehab treatment center. What keywords should you be striving for? Drug rehab? No, that’s too general and you’ll never rank highly with that. Heroin rehab? Better, but it’s still pretty broad. Heroin rehab in Florida?

Now, we’re getting somewhere.

Always ask yourself the following questions regarding keywords:

• Is this the right keyword for my website?
• Will users likely find my website when they type that keyword in their search?
• Is my website going to be what they were looking for?
• Will this result in more business to my company?

Google AdWords: Are They Worth It?

All businesses must have the discussion about Google AdWords sooner or later. It’s easy to be attracted to the idea of increasing traffic to your website so easily. However, for many companies, Google AdWords may not be the best idea.

For starters, the increase in traffic in no way guarantees an increase in qualified leads. Some may land on your website without any serious intention of doing anything. Unfortunately, they’re paying for these people to land on your site—possibly a lot of money. Remember that cost-per-click can be quite expensive, depending on the word. That means it will be impossible to compete with large companies that drop enormous amounts of money on AdWords every month. Fortunately, no company needs to depend on AdWords because there are far more cost-efficient ways to increase traffic and get qualified leads.

What’s a Long Tail Keyword?

It sounds like an odd term. However, it’s an important concept that must be understood. Consider, for example, a drug rehab center. Obviously, it would be great to rank #1 for the keyword “drug rehab.” Realistically, however, that’s never going to happen. Furthermore, ranking for such a general search term shouldn’t even be the objective in the first place.

In fact, the searches that really matter are called the “long tail” of search. The long tail represents hundreds of millions of truly unique searches. In fact, these searches are much more valuable to companies because the user is further along in the buying cycle. For example, a person searching for “drug rehab” is probably browsing, and may not be ready to move forward with treatment. On the other hand, if someone is searching for “best drug rehab in Southern California,” they are very likely to take the next step.

Keyword research requires time and expertise to work properly. Dreamscape Marketing, a proud Google Partner, can help you formulate an effective keyword strategy for your website. With an unprecedented 15 Google-certified staff members in the company, Dreamscape Marketing knows SEO. Call us today at 800-571-8553 and let’s discuss your SEO needs.