How to Align Your Keywords to Your Prospects for Maximum Impact

We’re going to get into the nitty-gritty of the importance of aligning your keywords with your prospects. And give you a system to achieve this, but let’s start out with a short illustration.

There’s a local venue where all the top touring musicians perform and they bring in Broadway plays as well. When you’re about to enter the building, you come face to face with something ten sets of double doors. There’s always a moment when you automatically pause and think about which door you should select. It’s just human nature.

You’ve already plunked down big money for your ticket. So, you know that within a few seconds you’ll opt for one of the doors and head into the venue.

It’s not that way when prospects pause at the “doors” of your website. They haven’t invested anything yet in your company. So, they can just as easily turn and leave as they can click their way more deeply into your website.

How to select multiple keywords

Unlike the performance venue I described above, you don’t want to overwhelm your website visitors with multiple doors. You want each door to be perfectly aligned psychologically with the visitor who is “standing” in front of it.

These “doors” that we’re talking about are landing pages, blogs, and ads for your website. For example, large, sophisticated, websites will have many landing pages. I’ve heard about some sites that have nearly 100 different landing pages. For example, an advertising agency whose clients are lawyers would probably have a landing page specifically tailored to all the various areas of legal practices. Such as divorce, criminal, DUI, corporate, and more. Each of these landing pages would have its own set of keywords. This would assure that prospects were presented with a “door” (landing page) that aligns perfectly with their specific interests. There would be no confusion.

The challenge then is to uncover all the different keywords that would lead someone to your website and use those keywords to create landing pages and other web content. You might discover many of these just through brainstorming, but don’t stop there. You can use Google’s Keyword Planner and do a little “reverse engineering” to make sure that you aren’t missing anything.

A Special Way to use the Google Keyword Planner

What we’re going to do is use the ability of Google’s Keyword Planner to show us the organic keywords of any given web page. And use those to be sure that we fully understand all the possible keywords we might want to use.

Once you’ve navigated to Google’s Keyword Planner (you’ll have to have an AdWords account to get there) enter the URL of a webpage that has a lot of information about the product or service that you’re selling. For my example, I’m going to pretend that I have a website geared toward helping people win the lottery and I’m going to have Google examine the Wikipedia “lottery” page for me.

Wikipedia with Google Keyword Planning

Using Wikipedia in this way is a great idea because you can be sure that just about every topical keyword that associates with your product or service tucks away in the Wikipedia entry. You should also use the homepages of your competitors in the same way. Here are just some of the 600-plus results I got when I analyzed the Wikipedia “lottery” page using the Google Keyword Planning tool:

online lottery results, all lottery games, american lottery, american lottery online, american lottery ticket, american lottery tickets online, american online lottery, australian lottery, best free online lottery sites, best lottery numbers, best lottery sites, best lottery to play in uk, best lottery to play uk, best online lottery, best online lottery sites, british international lottery, british international online lottery, british lottery, british lottery international, british lottery international 2013, british lottery international winners, buy a lottery ticket, buy a lottery ticket online, buy american lottery tickets online, buy international lottery tickets online…

As I look over that list, I see that many of those would be great keywords for a website that offer advice on how to win the lottery. Depending on how I wanted to use this information – landing pages, ad buys, or content creation – I could have Google filter the keywords further, especially if I wanted to buy some ads. I could also sort by search volume to help me prioritize which keywords I would concentrate on first.

Prioritizing Your Keywords

When I sorted the lottery keywords, I found that searches for British and European lottery information ranked the highest. With that information, maybe I would decide to target European prospects first and create search-friendly content using those keywords.

Here’s another advantage of using this system that mines an incredible number of keywords: You don’t want to “cannibalize” your keywords in your content. If you post a piece of content that starts getting a lot of traffic due to one keyword, when you create more content with the same keyword you risk “diluting” the power of your original post. It’s better to use other keywords that relate but are not identical.

See each of the keywords that you discover using the Google Keyword tool as a “door” to your website. Design each door to bring in prospects whose interests align perfectly assigning the keyword to that door. Repeat this process until you have created all the possible doors to your website.