OK – Lets talk about the most important you need to consider to make money from your website…

This concept, when I explain it to people, often results in a huge Aha!

It is going to seem obvious but hardly anybody gets it until it’s explained.

My new clients, who already have a website, often say to me “I’m already on page one of Google”.

It’s often said with a kind of resignation like they think they know that being on page one won’t help their business and in one way they are right. The trouble is they never thought about what keyword they were on page 1 for.

The first question I ask is “what keyword are you on page 1 for?”. This question can be quite stunning, people look confused like the answer is some how obvious. Then they will say something like “JoeBloggs.com” or whatever their website name is.

And here’s the big problem, here’s where it’s all completely wrong and the reason why their site isn’t getting any visitors and isn’t making any money.

You need to be on the first page of Google for very specific keywords to make money and the keyword is almost never the website name!

Let me explain this with an example…

One of my clients is an electrician working in and around the Plymouth area. The name of his company is Patafit. Sure enough if you type that name into Google his site comes up on page one. Sounds good right – well no actually. It’s not bad but it is of absolutely no value in increasing the profit of the business. Being number one for that keyword is useless. Why is that….

I know how to interrogate Google to find out lots and lots of valuable information about keywords.

There is absolutely nobody searching online for the keyword Patafit – none, zero, Nada.

So what are people who would actually like to hire an electrician in Plymouth searching for on Google, what keywords are these qualified leads typing in?

How about ‘Electrician Plymouth’ oh yes, How about Plymouth Electricians bingo. Now were getting somewhere.

Now search volume isn’t everything, there are lots of people searching online for the keyword ‘electricity’ but how many of these do you suppose are looking for an electrician in Plymouth – not many – the traffic is not targetted or qualified. So although we could expect lots of visitors they are unlikely to buy because they weren’t looking for an electrician and if they were it is unlikely that they would be in the Plymouth area.

So the key critical factors when targetting a keyword are:

• Large search Volume
• Targetted / Qualified Leads
• Profitability

The only one of these I haven’t mentioned yet is profitability. This simply means that it shouldn’t cost more in time and effort to get the traffic we want than we get back in revenue. For example – if ‘Best Electrician in Plymouth’ was a hugely competitive keyword (it’s not by the way) then we would have to spend a huge amount of time and effort = money to beat the competition to page one. That would negate any profit.

So in summary we need – targetted, money making keywords which have a significant number of daily searches but without so much competition that our profit would be wiped out.

The first thing I do free for potential clients is identify their money making keywords. Then I make them the money!

Totnes Consultancy - Helping You Capture Local Business with the World Wide Web