Finding the right keywords for your website

When you take your jewellery making business online the keywords that you select for your website are vitally important to attract customers. Not so long ago this was pretty much of a guessing game for a business going online. 

A keyword is a word that your potential customer types into a search engine when they are conducting a search online. So if you are selling handcrafted jewellery you might select the word or phrase “jewellery” or “handcrafted jewellery” as the words that a customer may type into a search engine such as Google or yahoo.

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But instead of making a guess as to what people are typing into search engines, you can now conduct your own research to see the words and phrases that people are using to search for goods they want to buy.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to make use of the Google keyword tool. https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal

To conduct you own research go to the link above and enter your keyword or phrase into the box. Enter the capture letters and click on the box “get keyword ideas.”

If you then scroll down you can see a list of keywords and phrases, based upon actual searches made within the Google search engine. You will see one of the top searches is the keyword “jewellery.” It has around 20 million searches every month. This is an awful lot of searches, however it is likely that this keyword is very competitive as there are many types of jewellery and some of it sells for a very high value.

To view how competitive the keyword jewellery is, you need to type the word into Google to see how many returns Google finds with the matching word jewellery. When you do this you will have the option of choosing a UK (or your country location) or a web wide search. On a UK search there is about 19 million returns and on a world wide search there are about 40 million returns.

What does this information tell us? It shows us that the keyword jewellery on its own is far too competitive, And if you were to build a website around this word you would be unlikely to receive any visitors from search engines wanting to buy from you. Your site would be one of many millions out there and the chances of anybody finding you by typing in the keyword jewellery would be very remote.

If you think of search engines like a classified section in a newspaper or a directory you will get a better idea of how they work. There a great many companies competing for the consumer’s attention, and everyone is trying to get listed in the top pages of Google for their chosen keywords. Obviously this is not possible and so to make the most of your opportunities you need to be clever about the keywords that you use in your online business.

As we have discovered, the search term jewellery is very competitive and so we need to look for a less competitive term or phrase that people are using which will give us a better chance to yield results.

Go back to https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal

 Now if you type into the search keyword finder “handmade jewellery” (without quotes) you will see about 49,500 searches within the UK and 74,000 globally. If you then select the phrase match facility you will see that this narrows further. About 27,000 people are searching every month for handmade jewellery in the UK alone. Now if you change the spelling of jewellery to jewelry to appeal to an American demographic you will see that there are 110,000 searches globally for handmade jewellery.  

By experimenting with terms that people are searching for it is possible to select a niche term that is likely to bring you search engine traffic. And once you have three or four terms or keywords that fit your product. Then you are ready to move onto the next step.

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