3 Keys to Getting Found Online
Today, we are going to talk a little bit about the keys to getting found online. As you might suspect, it has something to do with keywords, but let’s just first talk about what we were doing online anyhow, we’re communicating. In the old days, we use to go to a phone book when we needed a business. We may still ask friends and family, but now we do it in a more digital way.
When you’re trying to get found online, you’re really just trying to communicate with the people who are looking for you, but this communication can start a lot of times with the wrong choice of words. You may have been in an argument with a loved one, a misunderstanding with a friend. A lot of times, this boils down to having chosen the wrong words. What you are trying to say and the words you use did not get interpreted that same way. What I found is that the same thing’s happening online.
Key # 1: Always Know Your Audience
That’s really the first rule of marketing. It’s also the first rule of creating online presence. And the first rule to TV commercials. Come to think of it, it is also the first rule not getting slapped with a sexual harassment lawsuit. Always know your audience. Know who you’re talking to and get out of your own head and walk in their shoes.
You, as the person who is trying to communicate, need to understand your audience’s perspective and their perception of what’s going on, so that you can do your job and choose the right words, so that the communication can actually happen. Because if there are just words, words, words, words, that’s not actually communication. That’s just somebody talking.
Key #2: Don’t Guess
You can guess what the right words are, only if you measure and change them. As marketers, online gurus, or anyone who does digital marketing will tell you, “We started out with our best educated guess and then we revised as we got more information.” No one’s ever a hundred percent right the first time. We’re just simply not.
If you have built your website and you have taken a somewhat an educated guess what you should be putting on there from a content perspective, if you have not gone back and checked your analytics, your traffic, talked to the people who actually read your stuff and figured out if the communication is happening, then you’re missing something huge. You are missing a big opportunity to actually have that communication and connection with the people who are trying to find you and they’ll probably not find if you’re not using the words that they’re using. This is a mistake many people make when trying to be found online.
One of my favorite stories is about a client who had items for rent on their website. They had put up all of the information about how much it cost and the information about what it was and how to rent it was all there. We put in a site search tool so visitors could search for what they wanted to find, but also we could see what people were looking for. This information was used to update the content and make sure that people were finding what they were looking for. Well it turns out, people were looking for prices, not rates. The cost information on the site was labeled “rates,” but no one was finding it because that isn’t the specific word they were using to find that information. It was a small, but very important, difference.
That story illustrates that even if the words mean the same thing, people are never going to find what they’re looking for if we’re not calling it what they’re calling it. That’s why keywords are so important and you can’t guess, you have to know. You can start with an educated guess but then you have to refine.
Key #3 – Review & Revise
The internet isn’t static, and you can’t be either. If it’s a Facebook ad, a blog post, a social post, something that you share, your online presence, or if you’re building a website – When you first get started, it’s really critical in that beginning stage to review and revise weekly. And, with Facebook ads, you can almost do it hourly.
Depending on the medium, you need to be reviewing what’s going on and then revising based on what you’re seeing. The other piece here is that keyword research is so critical to making sure that you are using the terms that your audience uses and sometimes you have to make your best educated guess.
When you do proper keyword research, you go out, there are tools out there, moz.com, Google has a keyword research tool and there are several other things out there that you can use or you can use a professional, which is my preference because I know how critical this is to building your foundation for content, building the foundation for menus and other things in websites, but also even when it comes to Facebook ads and the rest of how you communicate with your audience. If you’re not using their language, they’re going to have a really hard time finding you even when they’re searching for what you offer.
