WFIM Blog: How to Make a Splash in the Business World

Does your business sell food or is it a restaurant? Are you a “bookkeeper” or do you provide “bookkeeping services”? To you provide “training” or “learning”?

These questions are fundamental to achieving a clear message for your website that will resonate with your audience and search engines. That is like getting chocolate chips in your chocolate cookie, double the reward. Understanding what words your prospective (and current) clients use when thinking about your product or service enable you to meet them where they are.

Do you like Cookies? What kind? Give me a glass of milk and a chocolate chocolate–chip cookie (or ten) and you have me. The lower the chocolate level gets the less interested I am. Does that make me right? Of course not, it’s just how I think about cookies.

I had an experience where my preconceived ideas of what and how people from out of the San Luis Obispo area would search for things in SLO. While doing research for a website project I found that people from outside our county look for things in “San Luis Obispo” and “San Luis Obispo County” not “SLO”. This is a perfect example of making sure we don’t guess when crafting a message or targeting keywords. The locals here call it SLO Town or County but the target(s) for this project were not locals. The light went on; do not assume, research and act on the facts.

Recipe Testing
How do good cookie recipes become good? Testing and refining, simple and necessary. How do targeted messages become targeted? See above.

Knowing the right terms for your website make a difference not just in your search campaigns but also determine how to describe them in the content. More fundamentally they can (and should) determine your website’s and other media’s information architecture.

Heat Up The Oven and Start Cooking up a Targeted Message
Take the time and invest the money to get it right. Mistakes will happen, assumptions will be wrong but with diligence and experimentation the right message recipe will emerge.

Please pass the milk.

In this age of fast paced information delivery it often seems that we need to do something new to attract attention to our businesses. Really there is nothing fundamentally new we can do. Sorry, I know that we are bombarded with options like Facebook, Twitter, text message advertising, online advertising and more but what we should “do” has changed very little.

The fundamentals of crafting a message have not changed; first find a need and create a solution, then write well about it, speak well about it and present the information in a pleasing manner to the right people.

You may need to “use” something new however. Websites for example are not new to us perhaps but certainly new in the history of message delivery. A good website communicates to the right people in a way that they are receptive to.

So when building an ad campaign or a website, start with a strong foundation, build on it and stick to the fundamentals.

KEI What is it? Why should you care?

If you have a website and want to attract visitors, you should care. It is not necessary for you to be an expert, but someone in your sphere of website pros should be.

Oh, What is KEI? Another acronym from the wonderful world of the web that stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index (see the Web Feet classic SEMSEOPPCETC for more acronyms, if you dare).

KEI is one indicator of how popular and how much competition there is for a particular keyword. This information helps to target keywords that are regularly searched and how much competition there is for them.

So if you want to be the most effective, look for keywords with a higher KEI than others that are still relevant to the website’s topic. In theory this helps the website rank higher organically or with paid results with less expense.

I know I said “in theory”, sorry, there is just no way (yet) to know all of the possible indicators.  KEI is a foundational bit of information that points us in the right direction.

Choosing the right keyword for a particular page is an important step in website development. KEI is one way to decide which keywords are going to be targeted by your site. No matter how great your keyword list is, if the words in it are highly competitive or not searched much you should rethink them. Unless of course you have money to burn or time to waste.

In general it is better to rank higher for a few very targeted keywords than lower for a broader cross section. Higher ranking leads to higher quality visitors, which leads to a better return on your investment. KEI information can help you rise to the top.