Keyword research never fails to surprise me whenever I’m writing search-engine optimised copy for a website. Just when you think you’ve got consumer behaviour sussed, something comes along that blows your preconceptions out of the water.

Such surprises really underline the importance of thorough keyword research. Even if you think you know your industry and your customers really well, you’ll find you don’t know them at all when they go online and start using a search engine.

Keyword research will demonstrate, for example, when people will look for a business by trade or by product.

Let’s say that two people want some well-optimised copy for their website to attract search traffic. One is a financial adviser, selling (or rather brokering) products like mortgages, pensions, life insurance and so on. The other runs a print and design shop who specialise in printing flyers and leaflets, business cards, letterheads and the like.

Search keywords relating to trades
In the first instance, most people know that if they want independent advice on a pension, mortgage or whatever, they need a financial adviser. So they won’t search by product – searching for “cheap mortgage” will just get them a search page full of the many aggregator sites that are out there. They’ll use keywords like “insurance broker”, “mortgage adviser” (or “advisor”) or, of course, “financial adviser” (or “advisor”).

Therefore, someone who wants some flyers printing will search using a keyword like “York printer”, then, right? Wrong.

Keywords relating to products
For some reason, and this was driven home to me recently, people don’t search for “York printer”. They search for “Flyer printing”, “leaflet printing” or “cheap business cards”. In other words, they search by product, not by trade.

Now, if you were a York printer, you could spend a fortune (not with me – my rates are very reasonable!) getting all your web copy optimised for terms like “York printer”. You’d be wasting your money.

What you need to do instead is get a whole load of content that’s optimised by the products that you sell. (A lot of e-commerce sites are naturally optimised like this: product details and reviews don’t just win over customers, they create a lot of really good deep, long-tail content that search engines – and users – love.)

This could necessitate a lot of extra content for the printer’s site compared to the financial adviser’s. But the extra cost will be minimal compared to how much they could have been lost in terms of ROI if they hadn’t done the keyword research and got all their copy optimised for search terms that weren’t relevant.

By the way, people don’t just search in those two ways – but that’s another blog post entirely.

But the moral is, of course, that it really pays to be thorough in your keyword research at a really early stage in your SEO considerations.

Ideally, you should do it while planning your website architecture – the keywords you need to be optimising for could dictate the size and structure of your site to a massive extent.

Better a nice surprise from your keyword research now than a nasty shock when you see your online takings.