On the hunt for good keywords? So many of our clients think they know just what searchers are using to find products and services. While they may know these high-level generic terms, they may lack a good idea of how their prospects think when searching. Or, perhaps, the term(s) they select is so competitive that the site may never rank for it.

For example, HVAC companies are well-aware of “air conditioning” searches, yes? Perhaps years ago, but time changes all! Service providers and searchers alike are now so much smarter about keywords, with the latter group knowing a generic term such as “air conditioning” will likely not yield the results they are looking for. Businesses must therefore be smarter about their strategy in this respect, while searchers must use more precise phrasing.

Wordtracker offers a tool that allows us to examine the keyword term “air conditioning” and see variations used. Remember, searchers understand the need for more specificity. They thus add geographic, brand, or function descriptions to their search to produce better results. For example:

• Carrier air conditioning
• Home air conditioning
• Houston air conditioning
• Trane air conditioning

We will take these searches even deeper to determine if a really unique and less competitive term exists. Yet even this level digs up some good ideas about how to create a title tag from keywords applicable to the client’s business, match popular search terms, and create solid content as support. Remember, search engines set out to return pages with the most relevance to a search: providing searchers with a quality experience. They are not, however, particularly concerned about your business, products, and services (until they get to PPC, that is). In this case, they are focused on the searcher.

The keyword search above tells us to use brands, geography, and a combination of both in our tags. And as every page must have a unique title tag to match its content, we now have multiple topics for our website using terms searchers have used. Is there anything better?

Unfortunately, it really does take more effort than the short explanation presented above. But at the very least, do some research to pinpoint better keywords for your title tag and corresponding page text. Put in the work, and the bots will come and index your page. And just maybe, searchers looking for your service will find it.