Bo Henriksens’s Weblog

Keyword strategies part I – the Mom test July 29, 2008

This is vacation week in Denmark, meaning that less than half of our company is at work, and the rest of us are strugling with the heat, we doen’t have A/C and rigth now there is about 86 degrees in the offices. So I thougth this migth be a good time for rambling about keyword strategies and how to pick good keywords in terms of SEO.

This first talk on keyword strategies, will be a very simple approach to getting started, which I’ve chosen to call the mom test. The principle behnd this way to find a good set af keywords to begin with, is to have someone without a deep knowledge, technical insigth or understanding of your products, services or business to help you, for example your mom. The reason for doing it this way, is that people with a good knowledge of the product, or people working with it every day, tend to be blind to the way their clients search. One example of this could be a computer parts webstore optimizing keywords for specific harddrives like ‘Hitachi CinemaStar 7K500 320GB’ because they always know what they want for themselves, but they migth have bigger success if they optimize keywords like ‘Cheap Hitachi harddrives’ or ‘Reliable harddisks’.

They point is, that even though you know every bit and piece of your business, you migth not know the how your users search for your products or services, so ask people who doesn’t know your business what they would search for, if they were to aquire your products or services.

End of part I, I’ll be back soon with part II.