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Let me start this blog by emphasising that a successful Internet marketing campaign is so much more than keywords, PCP campaigns or SEO optimisation. When people come to me with a SEO consultancy request, I make it clear that keywords are indeed important, but it is crucial that they are part of a proper Internet marketing strategy plan. Quality, carefully designed content which includes trends and demographics, a powerful social media presence and valuable links are vital in this competitive era. For example, if there was a marketing campaign and 80 percent of a site’s visitors were from the UK, it could not be designed the same way if they were from China. Cultural awareness, market and national trends must be considered. The country’s internet and technology status is also something to bear in mind (I will try to cover this topic on a later blog).

What I am aiming to do today is give give you some hints and tips regarding a  short and long tail keyword campaign I did for one of my clients. Now, I believe in practical examples – not just theory like lots of blogs out there – so I am going to illustrate my blogs with graphs and pretty numbers (are you still awake?) mainly so you can get an idea of how I work.

The results for this particular client gave pretty much the same results as a Google Ad campaign would – but – hold your breath – much less money was spent! At the end of the day saving money is a BIG incentive for most businesses and for me social media is all about sharing our experiences and helping others get the best results for the best value they can.

By the time I publish this post, Google might change ten algorithms in its code, SEO techniques might cease to exist and search engines might become personal. This is valuable content if you are planning to do search engine optimsation or a PCP campaign today. Tomorrow is a different story, especially when it comes to internet and technology!

Now, as I said I have been working on a keyword strategy for one of my clients who is a language training provider, offering courses to help improve accent reduction for native and overseas speakers. Let me clarify that by ‘keyword’ I mean words you will use in your web site content, your blog, your tweets, your PCP campaign or any search engine optimisation service you have chosen to invest in.
The client requested some research for keywords containing the words ‘business english’ and I used six keywords that would increase web traffic performance. In the table below you will see two different numbers – the one in the Searches column and the one in Google Count.

The reason Google Count has so many keywords is because Google calculates all possible phrases which includes thes keywords as the Exact Match Format shows below. Please remember that this is a sample and that when it comes to keywords and trends one company needs to continuously monitor the market, as people change the way they search for products or services so a keyword that is popular today might not exist in a year.
Please see the table below:

Let us now examine the phrase ‘business english‘. Based on UK web searches there are 114 people that use that word to search every month. In the competitors (IAAT) box you can see the competition that this keyword has, how many web sites have optimised their web pages for this keyword. This table shows there are 1.677.460, quite a lot don’t you think?

Now of course it is your personal choice to use this keyword, to optimise your blog, a page or even your whole web site because you or your SEO consultant believes that you can compete with sites ranked at number one such as the BBC for example and I wish you good luck with that.

I believe however there are alternative solutions to achieve similar results in a more cost effective way.  So what can you do?

Let us examine some alternatives:
If we look at the phrase ‘business english training courses’ we can see it has 104 people looking for this term and only 86 web sites as direct competitors. So we are talking about 10 less searches in comparison to ‘business english’ keywords and some 1.65 million less web sites to compete against, just by adding the term ‘training courses’ to the optimisation strategy. Exactly the same applies to the other two keywords I used. ‘English for business’ has only 8 more searches than ‘english business course’ yet the competition is much less (225 web sites versus 2,1586 web sites). ‘Business english in england’ and ‘business english in UK’ share exactly the same search requirements, but the later have only 6 web sites to compete with, while the former 352, which means that my client’s competitors optimised their web sites on the word ‘england’ rather than ‘UK’.

These are some small tips and tricks you can use before optimising a blog, a web page or your whole web site. You can do searches with free tools on the internet to find relevant trends and keywords, you do not have to pay anyone for this. I created a delicious stack for you with links such as Google trends, Google keywords so you can do your own research. So before you start spending money on Google Ads or optimise your web pages do a bit of research. There are no secrets with SEO, it is just a question of spending time investigating!