What Are Customers Asking For To Find Your Products?

Getting your products sold online means people that are looking for those products must be able to find your site.  Any search query can bring up an overwhelming amount of results.  Many times a client will tell me that they want to "rank" for a certain word or phrase but when I question why they picked that particular word their answer is just a guess.  "I think people would look for that". 

You don't have guess how people are searching, you can know what their searching, how many people a month are searching and if every other site on the planet is attempting to be found under that search query.

This is the first and most likely one of the most important things you can do on your website to improve your chances of being successful online.  This is not a one a done scenario by any means but if your time and money are both a factor in your day and you had to pick 1 area to spend your time on, this would be worth it.

There are over 200 filters that the search engines use to make the determination of who will show up on page one of a search query.  The image above shows you that clearly, the words that are being searched are taken into consideration when search results are displayed.  It's clear that the search engines are saying "look! you wanted this phrase and we found these words in these page titles". 

If you ignore this bold proof of concept that your page tiles, URLs and Meta descriptions are crucial to your site pages being found, then you are just wasting time and money.

How do you know what people are searching for?

Google is happy to share that information with you.  You just have to spend some time thinking like a person that would be doing the search.  Google AdWords is where the Keyword tool is located.  It is FREE! You will need to establish an AdWords account and they will insist that you set up at least one ad campaign but you can pause that campaign and never have to spend a dollar.  You will not be let into the keyword tool until you've taken this first step.

When I am working on optimizing a page or site, I create an excel sheet to put my findings in one place before I make my decision about which one or ones I will be using.  The image below shows a simple set up.  This makes it easy to remember various search queries and what type of competition there is for that word.

The best advice I can give to any website owner is that you must understand how your customers are finding your products.  You must be able to think like them when you describe your products so it means something to them.  There is a need or issue they have that made them look for your product in the first place, do you know what that is?  Do you confirm that your product will be the solution they're looking for when you've written your description of the product?  Would you buy the product given only the information you see on that page?

You will find that your products are being searched for many ways.  If a search query doesn't provide the correct results a customer was looking for, they simply change the way they ask.  Rarely do they go to the second or third page of any given search results page. 

Take the time to make sure you're using the right words or phrases on your product pages.

Now, the videos below are really not informational videos.  They are however a funny look at how people search online.  I only included them for their entertainment value.