In the world of bricks and mor­tar retail shop­ping the loc­a­tion of a shop is quite often the key to its suc­cess if it’s going to bene­fit from passing footfall.

Sim­il­arly some types of busi­nesses such as factor­ies and dis­tri­bu­tion centres, under­stand it is essen­tial to loc­ate them­selves close to a motor­way junc­tion in order to keep their deliv­er­ies flow­ing freely.

How­ever when it comes to trad­ing online, many of these real-world con­cepts fall by the way side as Google places little import­ance on where a busi­ness is loc­ated when con­sid­er­ing how to rank its web­site in its search res­ults (“loc­a­tion” mod­i­fier keyword phrases aside). What is import­ant how­ever are “keywords” and “relevancy”.

To under­stand what this means and why it is import­ant for your own web­site; it is help­ful to try and under­stand why Google is so pop­u­lar as a search engine and why in only a few short years, it has come to dom­in­ate the web as the search engine of choice for most people over the old stal­warts of Yahoo and MSN.

Back in the mid 1990’s before Google came along, when a search phrase was typed into one of the pop­u­lar search engines of the day the res­ults that were presen­ted were often poorly related to the search phrase being used. This res­ul­ted in the searcher hav­ing to trawl through pages and pages of irrel­ev­ant res­ults before they actu­ally found a web site that was worth look­ing at.

Then along came Google who star­ted to use a dif­fer­ent method of meas­ur­ing the import­ance of a web site to a par­tic­u­lar search term and as a con­sequence, began to deliver mean­ing­ful res­ults to people who use its search engine. Word quickly spread about this new search engine that actu­ally presen­ted ‘use­ful search res­ults’ and sub­sequently Google rap­idly became so pop­u­lar that today approx­im­ately 87% of all searches made on the web are done through Google.

And this Means What? To Me?

So what does this mean to you as a web site owner? Well quite simply, you need to make sure that your web site is rel­ev­ant to its sub­ject mat­ter and con­tains text with rel­ev­ant “keyword phrases” that are import­ant to your customers.

So for example if your busi­ness sells or makes “plumb­ing equip­ment” then you need to make sure that the text on your pages con­tains phrases or ter­min­o­logy that are centred on this basic concept, as these are the phrases that your cus­tom­ers are likely to use when search­ing for your business.

In this instance, such phrases as “pvc pipe fit­tings” or “radi­ator valves” might be some of the import­ant “keyword phrases” to use across your web­site. Time spent identi­fy­ing what these phrases and then re-writing the nor­mal text on your web site’s pages to include them, is time well spent and will make it easier to get your site ranked in Google.

To help you, use Google’s own Keyword Gen­er­ator Tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal to help you identify phrases that are rel­ev­ant to your busi­ness and its website.

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