Can you boil your business down to one, two, or three words? You’d better if you want people to find you through Internet search engines. Selecting the appropriate keywords for your business goes hand in hand with targeting the right audience for your product or service.

For example, if you Google the word “veterinarian,” 138,000 pages of listings appear; “veterinarian for dogs” results in 79,400 pages; and “veterinarian for dogs in Reseda” (a district of Los Angeles) produces only 9,910 pages. What this simple exercise shows is that the more you hone your business niche, the easier it is for consumers to find you.

That said, you can still target multiple consumer segments online, as long as you have a niche marketing strategy for each one. You can, for example, have different Web sites or different landing pages for different audiences. Freelance writer Robin Meyers maintains one Web site for her general copywriting services and another for her PR business.

Here are some other tips to consider:

• Hitwise (www.hitwise.com) provides lists of which search terms get the most hits in specific categories.
• Need ideas for keywords? Try Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com) or KeywordDiscovery (www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html).
• Rather than focus on single keywords, consider phrases or “long-tail” search terms. For example, the phrase “videos about scuba” will bring a more targeted audience than the word “video.” And if you are using pay-per-click (PPC) as part of your integrated Internet marketing, long-tail search terms tend to be more cost-effective.
• Go for second-tier search terms. Even if “Linux firewall” is what your business is all about, the keyword competition for that phrase is fierce. A less precise term, such as “corporate firewall,” may bring a much smaller piece of the Internet pie, but you can get a bigger chunk of it.
• Bidding for misspelled words can be a cost-effective way to increase results. For example, it’s not usual for a fast typist to plug “besthotels” or “bset hotels” into a search engine rather than “best hotels.”

The single biggest mistake growing businesses make with PPC advertising is that they link their ads to a standard home page. In fact, 75 percent of Google AdWords advertisers don’t use customized landing pages, even though those have been shown to significantly boost conversion rates. Remember, Internet searchers are looking for something specific. If you pay for the search phrase “red vintage wines,” don’t send potential customers to a general wine page.

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