A few more words on keywords

A few posts ago, I wrote about shaping your keyword selection for your website around your customers perceptions. In The best keyword is not always the most desired term, we discussed that even though the term “mobile home” has not been the official term for a manufactured home, it was still ingrained (by better than 2:1) in customers consciousness and needed to be addressed when optimizing web pages in order to not miss out on those customers.

This time we’re going to enlarge on that a bit and explore just what keywords you’ll want to optimize for.

We’re going to go back to the Google Keyword tool and check a few more keywords related to our industry.

Term   U.S. Monthly Searches
Manufactured Homes   550,000
Manufactured Housing   60,500
Modular Homes   450,000
Mobile Homes   1,220,000
Pre-fab Home   49,500
Prefabricated Home   14,800
Factory-built Home   6,600
Factory-built housing   590
Manufactured Homes for Sale   40,500
Mobile Homes for Sale   450,000

In the comments of my last post, John Thalacker posted the stat that the term “Clayton Homes” pulled 165,000 searches, far and away the most searched brand.

Here are a few more manufacturers (definitely not an inclusive list) and the keyword search stats for them this past month.

Term   U.S. Monthly Searches
Clayton Homes   165,000
Redman Homes   9,900
Oakwood Homes (Clayton)   33,100
Cavco Homes   4,400
Karsten Homes   5,400
GoldenWest Homes   390

If you’re in the process of optimizing, and you are a dealer for a manufacturer, be sure to optimize for the best keywords and for the manufacturer you represent. Make it easy for customers to find you.

Let’s try one more set of keywords – what they call “long-tail” keywords. Long-tail keywords are multi-word phrases that further qualify and narrow the search. They often contain a location. They are commonly used by people looking for a local business that has what they want. They tend to be more qualified than short-keyword searchers because they are looking for a specific product in a specific location.

Optimize for “long-tail keywords” that are pertinent to you and you’ll will get less – but much more highly qualified – leads.

Lets have a look at a few:

Term   U.S. Monthly Searches
Manufactured Homes, Kentucky   720
Manufactured Homes, Florida   14,800
Mobile Homes Indiana   5,400
Florida Mobile Homes   74,000
Manufactured Homes, Texas   6,600
Mobile Homes, Texas   33,100

Using a blog in your marketing efforts has an added advantage of using “tags.” Tags are very much like the old “keywords” Meta tag that has been deprecated by the search because of abuse.

You can optimize a blog post for a set of keywords much the same as any other web page. But then, using more variations of your keywords as “tags” will cause your blog post to show in results for those keywords.

Last week, I launched a website for a local limousine service here in Danville, KY. We used keyword specific pages and optimized for long-tail (localized keywords).

Within 4 days, we had grabbed the #4 spot in Google results for the keyword “Limousine, Danville KY” an ideal placement for the company. The #3 search result is my blog post announcing the launch of the website, so he is in effect holding the #3 and #4 positions.

Here is the Google SERP for that keyword set:

Google Search Engine Results Page

We’ve had some astounding results in ranking well for multiple keywords using WordPress software installed on the clients webs server. Much better result than we’ve had with WordPress.com or Blogger.

I believe that is because of the plugins that are available to self-hosted blogs. We’ll get into that more in the future.

How do you optimize for more keywords?

The best way I know of is to create more pages for your website, using each of them to optimize for a specific keyword set. As an example, visit my landing page for Danville, KY Online Marketing. You’ll notice in the navigation for this site that there are links to landing pages for each keyword for each city in my area. This page – in addition to serving as a landing page – ranks #1 on Google for its keyword set.

This is even easier to do and more effective using a similar technique in a WordPress self-hosted blog.

Start thinking about how you can better your Search Engine Ranking for specific keywords or get with us for a consultation.