The airlines used to care about phrases like “inexpensive airfares.” It took years before they figured out that we flyers type in “cheap seats,” or “cheap tickets.” They probably didn’t love calling themselves cheap, but they learned to call themselves what their customers were looking for.

Before you can strategize to increase your search engine rank or design paid search, you need to know what terms – keyword phrases – searchers are using and how attainable those terms are. We work with your team and your web analytics software to determine the four or five keywords that your company thinks are the most important for you. We then mine competitive sites and software tools to find effective yet attainable keywords, and present you with two recommended keywords and one backup term for each of your major pages to be optimized for organic search. If you are doing paid search, we look for as many keywords as possible for you to purchase, and then recommend which ones meet your needs and your budget. We will also recommend search by type. For example, if you sell batteries but you don’t sell nickel cadmium batteries, we may recommend negative search: you purchase a broad term like “batteries” with a negative keyword –NiCad, so that if the searcher types in both “batteries” and “NiCad,” your ad doesn’t show.

Choosing keywords that

•	are used by customers
•	are attainable for Search Engine Optimization (or cost-effective for Pay Per Click advertising), and
•	you like

takes a lot of effort. Sometimes, we know exactly what the right words are – but you hate them. Finding that golden balance is how we add the most value to the keyword research and selection process.

Recently, our CEO spoke at a conference and got this email a few weeks later:

The most important “quick change” she made was to change her keyword.