How To Find Out What Keywords Your Customers Are Searching With

Last Update: Thursday, August 27, 2009.

In this article I show you how to capture your most targeted visitors with the search engines by discovering what keywords they search with.

To get high search engine rankings, you must include the keywords that your potential customers are search with, in your web pages.

To find out what your most targeted keywords are, you need a keyword analysis service, such as Wordtracker.

Wordtracker will help you find all keyword combinations that bear any relation to your business or service. It does this by providing analysis of actual searches conducted in metacrawler search engines.

You may wonder why it's important that you need to know what keywords your potential customers are searching with. Let me show you why with some examples.

Here are the most popular searches for the different variations of the search term, "keywords," according to Wordtracker:

Search Term	Searches
keywords	273
Keywords	103
key words	68

Notice the different variations? The second keyword is capitalized. The third keyword is split into two words.

Here are the most popular searches for the different variations of the search term, "marketing strategies," according to Wordtracker:

Search Term	Searches
marketing strategies	319
marketing strategy	280
Marketing Strategy	172
Marketing Strategies	22

Why Is It Important?

Well, if you wanted to target search engine users, you would want to include all the different variations of the keyword you want to target. This will help to persuade the search engines that your web page is relevant for the different keyword searches.

Another reason is that some search engines, such as Inktomi, still take case sensitivity into consideration when ranking web pages.

Here's a table of Inktomi powered search sites that provide case-sensitive search results.

Search	Case-Sensitivity
ICQ	Full
LookSmart	Partial
MSN	Partial
Overture	Full

Knowing exactly what your customers are searching for is very powerful.

I have used this strategy over the years to help me obtain thousands of top 30 rankings for my web sites, and those of my clients.

If you need to improve your search engine rankings, I highly recommend that you reconsider your keyword targeting strategies.

Read my review of Wordtracker to find out just exactly how it can help you growth your search engine traffic.

Michael Wong is the editor of Mike's Marketing Tools, which offers internet marketing tools information and reviews, free marketing tools, and dozens of marketing tips that has been published on thousands of web sites.

Screenshot	Description
	Internet Business Promoter (IBP) is a SEO software program with features that include keyword research, top 10 webpage optimizer, search engine spider simulator, inbound link builder, link management, search engine and web directory submission, search engine ranking checker and customizable reports, scheduler, and project management. Internet Business Promoter is the only SEO software I know that guarantees top 10 rankings for keywords of your choice or you get your money back.
	Format	Free Trial	Cost
	Software download	Yes	Free/$249.95/$499.95
	Visit the Internet Business Promoter web site Read my Internet Business Promoter review

Screenshot	Description
	SEO Elite, by Brad Callen, is a SEO software program that offers a big collection of traffic generation tools, including how a webpage ranks high in search engines, finds high PageRank sites and Super Affiliates, finds and monitors reciprocal links, backlink search, reveals how many and which pages each search engine has indexed, regular search engine ranking updates, reveals exactly which sites your competitors are advertising on, exposes penalized sites you're linking to, and submit articles to article directories.
	Format	Free Trial	Cost
	Software download	Online demo	$167
	Visit the SEO Elite web site

More marketing tips