Unfortunately, this keyword research is almost always done after the site is built which is helpful but not a powerful as BEFORE the site is built. Keyword research is a process understood by few business people and frankly there are lots of web designers who don’t know how to do it either.
Using keyword research to select your main and secondary keywords before building your website helps build-in superior search engine optimization from the start. For example, many service businesses have a generic page called “services”. From a search perspective, it’d be vastly more valuable to have buttons or navigation with keywords. Your web person or internet marketing consultant can use keyword research to figure out what your main keywords and secondary keywords are and then plan the site navigation to include them.
Above is an example from a site we are completing now.
California Tours is a San Francisco tour operator that wanted a new SEO-friendly site. They’ve had 3 previous sites none of which were properly optimized. My keyword expert and I worked with them to plan this site around their keywords.
On the previous Cal Tours website (still live on the internet at this writing) the main navigation buttons were Group Tours, DMC Convention Services, Technical and Educational Tours. They’d come to realize that these terms were not popular keywords. Furthermore clients weren’t booking a group tour, instead they wanted a San Francisco vacation.
On the new site, scheduled to launch May 16, the main navigation buttons are San Francisco vacation packages, California vacation packages, Hawaii vacation packages, etc.
As a business owner, remember the best time to do keyword research is BEFORE you build a new site. The difference is when you can use keywords on a new site, you can make sure they appear in the main navigation, page titles and headers…All are important places Google is looking to find out what your website is about. The more you can leave aside generic terms like “services & about” and use real terms like San Francisco vacation packages the more your site will appear in search engine results.