John had a problem. His website was not getting the visitors he wanted even though he was spending hours upon hours of his personal time working on his sites SEO.
He needed help. So John called me and asked me to take a look at his website for him. He explained how he was doing a lot of SEO himself, he had optimized his site with his keywords and he had even done some guest blogging to try and increase his inbound links and referrals.
He was spending a couple of hours a week on trying to boost his site in Google, but he wasn’t seeing the results he was hoping for. Through pain staking effort his SEO was slowly improving but he was not getting the visitors to his site that he was hoping for.
He wanted to know what he was doing wrong and how we could fix it.
We ran a full audit on his website and John’s biggest problem was his keyword selection. Although he needed some help creating powerful links to his site and improving his websites optimization his biggest issue was that he was using the wrong keywords for his audience.
You see John had made the common mistake of using his own language and lingo for his search terms. He thought everyone, including his online customers thought and acted just like him. John owned a Mountain Biking Apparel company and had spent years in the textile industry. He used terms like “sublimation”, “garments” and “apparel”.
However after doing some research we noticed that most people were searching for terms that used “clothing” and “gear”, “tops” and “bottoms”. So even though people were looking for his product online they couldn’t find him because his site did not rank well for the keywords they were using.
We changed his onsite optimization from his keywords to the ones being used and his sales shot up. Suddenly his customers could find him. Referral links also increased dramatically as suddenly visitors outside of the garment industry were finding his website and loving his products and content.
It sounds like something Mr Miyagi would say from the Karate Kid.
“Knowing what is being searched for is the first step in being found.”
Profound and true. Mr Miyagi is so wise!
The solar energy industry is no different. It is easy to get lost in the industry lingo, to expect everyone to understand the terminology and phrases you use to describe and explain what you do everyday. However you need to dumb it down. right down. right down to the layman level.
There are lots of tools on the internet to find out what keywords people are searching for. One of the best ones is the Google Adwords Tools, it can provide valuable insights into the number of searches for a specific keyword each month.
Research takes time, so I thought I would include the top 12 keywords being searched for in solar energy and solar power related searches and how often they are being used.
They are: