Home Based Travel Agent News

Find your keywords (or phrases)

by Sophie Bujold

If you've been online for any amount of time, I'm pretty sure you've heard about keywords. They help you describe who you are and what you do in a way that helps web surfers find you more easily.

Keywords are used everywhere: on websites, in bios, on profiles, on about pages, etc.

If you want to get found for the services you offer, you need to have keywords in what you write.

So, this week, I want you to take a few minutes to brainstorm keywords that describe your business and/or services.

Here are the steps I want you to take:

1. Grab a blank sheet of paper and start listing the words and phrases that come to mind when you think about describing what you do and what you offer clients. These words can be destinations, travel styles, job titles, travel types, and anything else that's related to what you do. List as many as you can and don't censor yourself.
2. Once you're done, start thinking like a client and circle the words you would search for if you were looking for travel services like the ones you offer. If any new words come to mind, add them to the list and circle them too.
3. Open up a Word document and type up the words that you circled into a clean copy of your list. Your list should now contain 10-20 words at most
4. Look through the list again and use the bolding tool to bold word that you know are popular. Those will become your primary keywords or phrases.

From now on, whenever you have to write something online about your agency, grab your keyword list and choose words from it to help you craft your message.

The longer the text, the more words you can include. If it's a short blurb, focus on your primary keywords.

Use this list when crafting things like web pages, an online bio, your Facebook about page or otherwise.

If you'd like to get more scientific...

If you're curious to see if the words you choose are the words people really look for, check out Google's Keyword Search Tool. You can enter any keyword you're thinking about and assess its popularity.