Try this – humor me – please go to Google and type in “women entrepreneurs business coach” – come on, go do it. There I am – www.ontrackandonpurpose.com at Number One!!!!Also listed number one for:“Coach for women entrepreneurs”“Coaching for women entrepreneurs”
“Women entrepreneurs business coaching”
“Woman entrepreneur coach”
For “Women’s business coach” I am number 9
And for “Women’s business coaching” I’m still on that critical first page in position number 10!
How awesome is that?
I’m soooo psyched, and I want to thank you all for your support and interest and everything – you all ROCK!
Now, (deep breath) other than totally making my day, what does that all mean?
Note: Those of you who are just psyched for me but have no interest in reading anything about keywords and online marketing should feel free to stop reading now. No problem! If you want to learn a little about SEO (search engine optimization) and keywords, read on!
Well, let me be clear about this – the fact is, there are not hundreds – or even dozens – of people searching for those exact keywords every day. But there are some, and those people who are typing in those words are really looking for what I have to offer – it’s very targeted traffic– which is fabulous!
I have been working hard to “brand” myself as the women entrepreneurs business coach, and expanding and improving the website to be a resource site for women entrepreneurs, so it’s awesome to see some results so quickly.
As any of you who have a website know, the search engines can be incredibly hard to get any kind of decent ranking on. The competition is fierce, and you have to navigate through the confusing and ever changing world of SEO – Search Engine Optimization.
Among other things, you have to figure out what keywords people are actually searching for, and there can be a huge difference in both popularity (how many searches are performed) and competitiveness (how many other websites out there you are competing against to get that top ten ranking) simply from a very small change in the search term you type in.
It’s almost impossible to figure this out for yourself without the use of a search tool which will tell you how often a keyword phrase is searched for and what the competition is. The very best tool for this is the one I use, Wordtracker. Wordtracker allows you to see how often your keywords are searched for, how many other websites are competing for them, and suggests other, related keywords that you would never have thought of on your own.
Wordtracker is not free, it’s a paid subscription service, but you can sign up for shorter or longer periods of time to use it depending on your needs, and, quite frankly, there just is no other tool that does what it does.
Here’s an example of how a small change in a keyword term makes a big difference: I made it into the elite top ten, first page on Google for “women’s business coach” but if you look for me under the results for “womens business coach” (no apostrophe), you’ll see I’m not there. I’m not sure how far back I am, I stopped looking after the third page – (although there is a reference to me on the top of the third page, a review of my business coaching on a popular women entrepreneurs website called www.empowerwomennow.com.) And, (I love this!), when you type it in without the apostrophe, Google asks you, “Did you mean “women’s business coach”? (like Google is the grammar police!) so if anyone clicks on that they’ll get taken to the page I’m on! So great – it feels like payback for all my years of being a grammar nut.
But back to your keyword/SEO lesson — why would that be, that an apostrophe makes such a big difference? Fact is, most people don’t bother with apostrophes when they search online, which means the version without the apostrophe is more competitive, which means my website, which is relatively new, hasn’t worked its way up to the front page – yet!
Understanding how all this works allows me to both target more popular (and more competitive!) search terms such as “women entrepreneurs,” which will provide me with a lot more traffic once I move up in the rankings, and also benefit me now from the less popular but extremely targeted and less competitive keywords, such as “women entrepreneurs business coach,” where I am – did I already mention this? – Number One!
If you are planning to rely on online marketing for any substantial portion of your business, I can’t stress enough the importance of either using the Wordtracker tool or hiring an SEO professional who is using it. There’s a lot more to getting on the first page of Google than just using the right keywords, but there’s no doubt they are a huge piece of the puzzle, and you need to have the right tool to make them work for you!
Okay, enough with the lesson, time to celebrate! Number One on Google? You’re lookin’ at her!
