A secret trick to get more visitors to your website

Those of you who run your own sites, know how important it is to get on to page one of Google. Actually, to get to the top of Google’s page one. Less than 1 in 10 searchers go to page two of Google. Google give you nearly 9 out of 10 of your visitors, so lets just fish where the fish are.

BROAD KEYWORDS ARE NO GOOD FOR YOU
if I model my web page around a broad keyword which everyone uses, then I'm not going to get to page one. The big boys will dominate the first 6 pages. We run a couple of web sites for holiday vacations in our little cottage in Scotland. If I try and get on to page one for "holiday cottage Scotland" I'm doomed to page 8 or worse.

VERY NARROW KEYWORDS ARE NO GOOD EITHER
So I must narrow it, a bit. If I make it too narrow then I'll get no visitors. I could model it around "holiday cottage Kentallen" This is our little village but no one has heard of it, and few people use it as a search term.

On the other hand I could get quite a lot of site visitors if I used a slightly broader term - say, a bigger place nearby. I've got options such as "holiday cottage"/ "vacation rental"/ "self catering"/ "Scottish highland holidays"/ "Glencoe cottage" (that is a bigger place near us) or "lochside cottage" / "Glencoe self catering" and so on.

You get the drift, there are many alternative phrases I could use, but I can't use them all to promote the same page. After all, I could promote the page using two or three of these phrases, but they need to be repeated on the page several times each if Google is to take them seriously.

I always try and remember that Google is not a person, it is just an electronic pulse.

So how do I know which phrases people actually use? I can get to Google's keyword selector site or use some other keyword selector sites, but these are all for big phrases and suit the big sites with many visitors. They'll not give me a result for my smaller search terms.

HOW I FIND OUT THE RELEVANT STRENGTH OF THESE KEYWORDS. I CAME ACROSS THIS TRICK BY ACCIDENT
So how do I solve the problem and find out which of these little phrases are more powerful than the others? I'm looking to sort these phrases into a list of those which people use a lot and those which are useless.

I found out what to do when I used a small Adword, operated by Google. To find out how to use an Adword I just entered "Google Adwords" and bought one. You want to keep the cost very low. My advice is to limit your budget to a small amount per day, less than $2. Use a very small price per click, less than 20cents a click. Run it for a few days, that's all. By then you'll probably have your answers as to how many people are using your chosen keyword phrases.

In the Adwords analysis, Google always tell you how many people have used each phrase you enter. Notice, this is how many people have used the keyword, not how many have clicked on it. You don't want people to click on your Ad using that keyword. You just want to know how many used that keyword, or phrase, and Google will tell you.

A REAL EXAMPLE FROM ONE OF MY WEBSITES

I was building up some new pages to go into my site, relating to Scottish history and other matters, but I wanted to find out how many people were using the phrases I thought of. Here is the list together with the numbers of people clicking on these phrases over the week or so when we ran the little Google Ad.

Scottish tourist board 2400
Robert the Bruce 1500
Touring Scotland 1300
Lochaber 1300
Highland 1000
Glencoe 800
West coast 700
The Highlands of Scotland 600
The West coast of Scotland 570
Last minute Scotland 400
Viking battles 173
Late availability cottage 124
Scottish wars of independence 120

There were many other phrases I checked on, but these got very few results, so obviously I abandoned them.

AMAZING RESULTS
I was amazed to find how many people typed in "Scottish Tourist Board" (which does not exist, it is called VisitScotland these days).
Also a Scottish hero from the 14th century, "Robert the Bruce", was searched for even more frequently than "Highlands of Scotland"

What I now have to do is to enter the good keywords into Google search and see what sort of competition from other websites I’ve got. I look at the number of total impressions on different websites Google records for each phrase. Look at it, top right, on the Google results page.

If there are few impressions, then it becomes a strong candidate for my website page, but on the other hand if the competition crowds it out, then I might use a different important phrase but which has less competition. This is not science, it is an art, a guessing game, even. But gradually you get better at it.

I do this as a matter of course now, whenever I build a new page in my website. I’ve got some very high traffic pages, listed well up in Google and then I promote my cottage on that page with pictures and links, and I get a lot of people then looking at the cottage details.

We have the biggest site traffic website in our area, even bigger than the large hotel groups. Half of our site visitors come into the inside pages first, before looking at the cottage pages. Many never look at the cottage, but do I care? Not a bit.