Keywords - an absolutely critical piece of the web marketing puzzle. Not of themselves, but because they act as a lens through which to laser-focus your marketing efforts.

Whether you know it or not, your website will be broadcasting certain words and phrases – but they may not be the right ones.

The 'key' words you use on your website and in your marketing efforts tell the world what you offer. The trick is to use the same words that your audience use – and these are the words they use when they Google something.

The only way to know if you've got it right is to do a bit of investigation. Otherwise you are just guessing or worse assuming the search behaviours of your audience, and this will mean your site design, content, search marketing, SEO and social media marketing will miss the mark.

The best keywords may not be what you think.

We recommend you have a short list of keyword phrases because it is much easier and more effective if you focus your efforts.

The best keyword phrases are ones that have four characteristics:

1. Relevancy to your business – if you sell supplies for making chocolate at home, there is no point targeting "home cooking recipes" just because lots of people search for them. All you'll get is people who want something different to what you actually sell.

2. Sufficient Volume. This means enough people use the phrases to be worth it. There's no point being on the front page of Google for "star shaped chocolate mousse dish" if no one uses that phrase.

3. Are Competitive. If you are a small business there is a good chance you will have competing companies with a lot bigger budgets that have been around a lot longer. If your industry is a crowded one, there will be a lot of businesses trying to attract attention. You could waste a lot of time and energy trying in vain to get the attention of searchers using the most popular phrases. Try and find ones that don't have as much competition – even if they aren't used quite as much, they can still pay off because you aren't competing as hard.

4. Commercial viability – similar to relevancy, make sure you target those areas of your business that are the most profitable.

 6 steps to Creating your Target keyword List.

1.Prepare a spreadsheet

Create an Excel or other type of spreadsheet to hold your results with the column headings: Keyword Phrase, Number of Searches, Competition, and Visits

2.Brainstorm

Brainstorm a couple of words to get you started.

Ask yourself questions like:

• What type of questions do my prospects ask?
• What are they trying to accomplish?
• What problem are they trying to solve?

Get input from other people – staff, customers, suppliers, friends and family. Just ask them what words they use and add to your list. Have a look at your website traffic reports at what phrases are already bringing people to your site.

As a check, enter some of the phrases into Google – do the results reflect what your business is about? Are the websites listed offering similar things to you? If no, it could be that your phrases aren't quite targeted correctly or you have been too generic.

If relevant to your business try and think of those phrases that are buying signals such as 'best DVD player' or 'bicycle repair kits' in addtion to generic terms that will bring you people just looking for information.

Once you've exhausted these sources, the list of words you've come up are your seed words – put them in the first column of your spreadsheet.

3.Search Volume = the size of your market

Working out volume means finding out how many people actually look for what you have on offer using your keyword phrases. Typically you'd work on monthly volumes.

There are several software tools to do this stage, but many require payment. Market Samurai is one, and their keyword component comes free.

In this example, we've used Google's free keyword research tool

Copy your 'seed' words into the first box, then set your location and language as appropriate, enter the capture and click on search.

Google will return a list of your search terms with the number of global monthly searches, local monthly searches and the competition for these phrases.

If you see phrases with hundreds of thousands of searches per month, you'd think this was a good thing – not so!. It is likely that the word or phrase is too general and could relate to a range of topics, and included in a number of searches.

For example "Chocolate" could be included in "Chocolate cake", "Chocolate Milk" or "Chocolate banana sunday recipe".

Copy the number of searches for each seed word into your spreadsheet. If you aren't focusing on local business you can use the global searches, otherwise use local monthly searches.

It is up to you to decide where your cut off point is, but anything with only a few dozen searches a month means you are targeting a small niche without enough activity to keep you going.

Underneath this list you will see a list of keyword ideas – Google generates these based on your seed phrases. Many of them will not relate to your business but you can get some good ideas of less common phrases or ones that you simply didn't think of, from this list.

Select any that relate well to your business and have sufficient number of searches and copy them into the spreadsheet along with the search volume.

4. Assess the competition

While Google's keyword tool is useful, it doesn't provide enough detail about competition.

Competition is an indicator of how many websites contain the search phrases you are considering. The more there are, the harder you will have to work to attract attention.

Go to Google homepage and start entering your potential search phrases in quote marks eg "Chocolate ingredients". Putting them in quotes will show number of pages for exactly that phrase.

At the top of the search results you will see "About 60,000,000" results. This is how many pages Google can find that includes the phrase you just entered. The higher the number, the greater the competition for that phrase. For example "Chocolate Piping Bag" has only 5,400 results compared to 27,000,000 for "chocolate cake".

The lower the number, the less competition – and the better for you.

Do this for each of your keyword phrases, entering the figures into your spreadsheet.

You will start to see a pattern emerging by now! You want to find the sweet spot - phrases that relate closely to what you offer that have a reasonable number of searches, but a low number of pages listed in Google.

5. Select your top ten

Once you have put all this in your spreadsheet the good candidates should emerge.

It may make sense to group keyword phrases under a single seed word. For example under "Chocolate cake" you might have "Chocolate cake recipes", "Chocolate cake icing recipes", "the best chocolate cake recipe". Then under "Chocolate Icing" you might have "chocolate icing made simple", "chocolate icing ingredients" etc.

Don't pick the most generic, obvious phrase(s) because you think you'll be covering all the bases.

You can also enter the number of visits you already get to your website for the phrases.

6. Refine, refine, refine

Test, measure, refine, rinse, repeat.

Each month you should review your website visitor information to see what keyword phrases are bringing visitors to your site.

Have a look at which keywords are resulting in more sales, more time and/or lower 'bounce' rates as these will be the ones that are more valuable - even if the volume is lower than other more generic or popular words.

If you find yourself changing the keyword word phrases in your 'top ten' lists, you will also have to refine your website keywords, title tags and other SEO elements to reflect this change.

If your market is small, say if you are focused on local business only, you may only be able to come with a short list before the lack of data lets you down. But over time, your own analytics data - from website visitors reports and/or Adwords campaigns will give you more information to refine your list.

7. The long tail

More recently, Google has been trying to find ways to improve a searchers experience with something called 'semantic search' which tries to understand user intent.  The end result seems to be that generic phrases are becoming used less often and searchers are using phrases because they get a better result.

This is positive because you can get high rankings by targeting these phrase individually, such as 'how much is the penalty for late tax payments' or 'when is my gst return due' etc.  This doesn't apply to every industry sector however.  In our experience, the more competitive your industry is (like finance), the more players there are in the market, the more likely searchers are to use long tail keyword phrases.

('Long tail' is a reference to where these phrases sit on a statistical volume chart)

Action Points:

Develop or review the top keyword phrases for your business.

Review your current marketing assets such as website, brochures, social media sites - do they reflect the words that are relevant, competitive, commercially viable with sufficient volume?