Almost from the first days of the web in the 1990s, people began to create keyword search features that would let users find web pages that contained the text they were looking for. It was a natural step in software design. There were already some very sophisticated search algorithms that worked on databases, either stored locally or on a private server.
Google came as close as anyone to perfecting keyword search technology, and today can pull a few dozen or a few million relevant results from hundreds of billions of pages, usually in under one second. Because keyword search, and its sister, hashtag search, is almost everywhere these days, it’s important to understand the keyword process, both in your ads and as part of your sales funnels.
When someone searches Google (or Bing, or Yahoo) using a keyword phrase, the search engine technology uses very precise algorithms when it arranges the results that get displayed. To put it another way, your rank on the page can be influenced by several factors.
More importantly, how well your page ranks for a particular keyword (outside of advertisements) has a huge impact on the amount of traffic it gets every month. Studies have shown that if your page is in the first position in the ‘organic’ listings, it receives about 45% of all the search traffic for that keyword. About 90% of the traffic goes to sites that rank on the first page. And unfortunately, if your page ranks down on the third page of results or below, it will probably never be landed on from that particular search.
Regardless of whether you teach yourself how to use the tools of keyword marketing or hire someone to do it for you, it needs to be a big part of your online marketing strategy.