Like millions of other people each year my News Years Resolution is to lose weight from all the turkey, chocolate and booze I have managed to pack away this festive season.  This is the same every year as people want to get fit again in time for summer, creating a massive increase in the interest of; weight loss packages, personal trainers and boot camps.

We need to listen to our market and respond with our online activities…

To get an idea of the amount of people searching for weight loss I used the Google Insight Tool, which is a great tool for predicting when and what people are searching for. I searched for “weight loss” in the United Kingdom, the results are as follows.

The image below shows the same results over a number of years (2004 – 2011). You can see that every year there is a spike in the amount of people searching for weight loss” in January and December and again in the summer. These numbers are increasing each year as the graph shows and includes a forecast for 2011. In the forecast for 2011 you can see the same pattern occurring as in previous years and that the overall amount of people searching for “weight loss” will increase as it has done steadily over past years.

In the image below you can see that there is a clear increase in the amount of people searching for weight loss in January and December and again during the summer (as highlighted) in 2010.

This year will be particularly competitive as people are watching the purse strings after the festive month and we all have the additional stress of the VAT rise. So with saving in mind why are you paying out for search engine optimisation (SEO) when you can do it for free? Get clients losing pounds and putting them in your back pocket by optimising a page on your website yourself.

This strategy is not only for the New Year and Festive season, it can be applied to areas your business all year round. Although it is important to be prepared at this time as there is always a massive increase in those looking to lose weight fast as seen in the results above. You could be missing out on a bundle of potential interest in your business or burning money on SEO that is not bringing in the clients. So take your business to the next level by optimising a page on your website, making the most of this sudden increase in interest in weight loss.

First things first: to start with you will need to filter out what you think your keywords are for your page. These are all the words that people will be using to search what they are looking for. For example: weight loss, lose weight fast, weight loss diets, and weight loss boot camp. Once you have these in a list for each page you should use the Google keyword tool to see how competitive these are and if there are any related words that you may not have considered. Make a list of all the keywords that are highly competitive and that have high global monthly searches.

 Include these words in each of your pages; include them in the page title, in the first sentence of your first paragraph, in the last sentence of the last paragraph and include 3 keywords for every 100 words of content you write. Make sure that all the key words and phrases you are using are relevant to that specific page and that you are not just blindly adding the keywords anywhere. Keywords have to be smooth to read and be useful to viewers, do not just go into your content and dump the same word over and over, consider variations; singular, plurals, synonyms etc.

The most important thing to remember is to listen to your market and respond, resolving their problems.

If you haven’t got time or the techy know how to perform this activity on your site you might miss out on the rich pickings at key times of the year. Then you may wish to get us to help you If you want to know more email us at info@ofsoftware.biz or call us on 01634 883 444.

Watch out for next month’s blog where we will discuss how you can take advantage of people searching for your services using a lead page.

Good luck!