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Here’s a scenario for you: you have a new company and, naturally, you want to build a website to promote it. Let’s say that this company is a health food retailer. You know that you need to promote keywords and get other people to link to your site so that you can improve your search engine rankings, but… how do you go about doing that? Unless you are an SEO expert, it’s going to be fairly hard to get what you’re looking for and even if you are an SEO expert or champion web designer, there’s still a lot of competition out there.

This means that you need a targeted, focused strategy to promote your new health food business. A lot of people might, at this point, turn to Google’s keyword tools. These are free and so they’re very appealing to use. Yet with so many people doing exactly the same thing and the fact that, no matter how good they might be, Google naturally have their own interests at heart, it’s unlikely that this will be enough to ensure success across all platforms. This is why we at Ampheon Web Design London are big fans of Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com), which offers a much more comprehensive experience when it comes to keywords, link building and strategizing.

After all, if you are a health food retailer (or pretty much any other business you can think of), you are likely to have a lot of competition. With more than 2.1 million enterprises in the UK alone, it’s practically a given that you are going to be facing some competition, even in a niche market – and that’s without taking account of growing international competition as the internet expands and becomes more important to businesses everywhere.

One of the best things about Wordtracker is that it can help you target not just keywords, but what are known as long tail keywords. To take the above example, while some people will undoubtedly do internet searches for ‘health food’, more people will search for longer, more specific terms such as ‘health food shops in London’ or ‘local health food retailers’. These sorts of key terms are much more valuable to you in the long run as there is likely to be less competition for them and they will also be more specific to your business: it might be next to impossible to get to the top of the Google rankings for ‘health food’, but you might be able to get there for a term such as ‘health food retailer London.’

Wordtracker will be able to identify keyword searches for your terms and will offer you lots more results than a free tool will ever be able to. This makes your investment more than worthwhile as picking up increased, targeted traffic is important when it comes to translating site readers to sales. It will also be able to identify related searches that are still relevant to your terms. For instance, for the term ‘health food’, other related terms could include ‘nutrition’ or ‘children’s health’, ‘diet’ or ‘healthy eating’. These are all keywords that could help to boost your search rankings if you incorporate them into the content on your site and you are more likely to have success with them than if you just target one generic term.

Another thing that we love about Wordtracker is its tools that help with link-building. This is an important part of SEO and any SEO expert or web designer will tell you how crucial it is to get quality inbound links in order to boost your site. Not just any link will do, though. They need to be relevant to you. For instance, if Ampheon were to ask a women’s fashion blogger to link to our site, it probably wouldn’t offer much in the way of link value. If, however, we got one of our clients – someone with credibility, a good search engine reputation and good levels of traffic to their site – to provide us with an inbound link, that would be much more valuable.

This is the sort of help that Wordtracker can provide: using their link-building support service allows you to identify where your competitors have got their links from, which is really useful as it allows you to work out where you should target when it comes to organising campaigns. So, even though our health food retailer might be best friends with someone who works for a law firm, a link from them might not be ideal. Instead, the Wordtracker tool might suggest blogs related to the subject or local companies who might have an interest in promoting other businesses. For instance, universities often have sections on their websites that tell students what’s in the area. Here, they could include a link to the health food retailer’s site to highlight the fact that there is a health food shop in the area.

Of course, you might think that you could sort all this out yourself – and maybe you could, but it would take a long time to do, eating into valuable resources that you could be directing elsewhere to better effect. Using Wordtracker to do the hard work for you will cut down on the amount of time you have to spend identifying both good link opportunities and important keywords for you to target. You’ll benefit from better, increased levels of traffic and a better understanding of how you can promote your online business in the market you’re operating in.

This means that Wordtracker is useful for all companies: whether you are the biggest health food retailer in the land or just setting up in a little shop on a road off the high street, it can help you to identify likely avenues that will bring you more and better business. We here at Ampheon have considerable experience when it comes to web design and all things SEO and we are definitely of the opinion that Wordtracker is pretty nifty. Yes, you can get Google tools for free, but they’ll never give you the depth of information or level of detail that Wordtracker will give you. And, at a time when the internet is increasingly competitive, that sort of tailored support is invaluable.

By Chelsey Evans

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