How do you find the exact keywords that your potential customers use to search, when they are getting ready to buy?
Professional marketers will often advise that you should optimize your web pages with long-tail keywords and there’s a very good reason why. Let’s consider how a customer, let’s call her Randa, goes about researching a product and making a purchase.
- Buying cycle
- Awareness of a problem/need
- Information gathering
- Evaluation of alternatives (features, quality, price)
- Purchase decision
- Purchase
- Post-sale product re-evaluation
In other words, Randa starts off her research with the basic keyword “head” term “jeans.” It’s the most obvious and generic search for the product she’s interested in. Also, remember for Randa it’s not a “product,” it’s an item of clothing that will form an important part of her wardrobe!
As Randa does more research, she gets more of an idea about the jeans she is looking for, and closer to the purchase-decision. Her searches will become more specific. She is likely to search using long-tail keywords. So how do we figure out what those keywords could be, so we can optimize?
The Free Keyword Tool is a great way to identify long-tail keywords that are specific to Randa’s needs.
Let’s say I’m selling jeans, and I’m launching a website to reach more customers. I’m looking for the right keywords to attract people to my website, but I don’t want to invest too much money right now, so I sign-up for Wordtracker’s free tool.
I start by entering the primary/head keyword “jeans” into the free tool. When I signed up for the free tool, I verified my email, so instead of 50 results I get 100 results for the US, UK and global markets. Here are the top results:
I can see that “jeans” received easily the most searches, but it also has the most competition. That means that there are many many other marketers out there who are optimizing their websites for the word “jeans.”
When Randa types in the word “jeans” she is probably doing basic early research. She is likely to be a long way from knowing exactly the product she wants to purchase. What I need to do is optimize my site to attract potential customers when they are close to the purchase decision.
Looking at my results for “jeans” I can see that “skinny jeans” also had a high volume of searches, but has less competition. So I use the free Keyword Tool and select “skinny jeans” to see if I can discover longer, more specific keywords.
Right away, I’m looking at a list of long-tail keywords that are much more specific. The long-tail keyword “black skinny jeans” looks promising, and so does “men skinny jeans.”
Now I can think about optimizing my category or product pages for these long-tail keywords. Randa’s been searching for a while now, comparing types of jeans, and she has a clearer idea of the jeans she wants. Now she’s searching for “black skinny jeans” and because I optimized my web site for that term, it’s now showing-up higher on Search Engine results. Randa’s found my site by searching for skinny black jeans. If I’ve got my conversion funnel sorted out, I could have new customer.
The Free Keyword Tool will give you 50 – 100 results, but if you want to take your marketing up to the next level, I suggest you try out our regular Keyword Tool, which provides up to 2000 results and includes a “Related Keywords” feature. It also saves you time with features that help you save multiple lists and drill down into keyword niches. This means that you can build details lists of keywords around specific niches like 'skinny jeans' 'boyfriend jeans' 'black skinny jeans' and so on - and being able to get right into the long tail keywords can reveal amazing insight into your customers' needs.
Get started today with the Free Keyword Tool and find what your site's visitors are *really* looking for.
