If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a dozen times: “We want to rank on the first page of Google for {this term.} Can you help us do that?”

A lot of times, I can. Even more times, however, I’m going to do some research and come back to you and say, “You may want to rank for that term, but I don’t recommend it, because no one is searching for it.”

Recently I’ve started working with more business owners who offer alternative healthcare options: Naturopaths, acupuncturists, energy healers, reiki practitioners, etc. This sect of healthcare is continuously growing as more and more people are looking for other “alternative” options to western medicine’s approach to wellness. The thing is, most of these practitioners hate the term “alternative.” It makes it seem like they’re outside the norm for healthcare – some sort of “fringe” healthcare, instead of a legitimate healing option, although many people don’t know enough about these practitioners to know how their offerings could help.

There’s a new up-and-coming word in healthcare: integrative. Integrative healthcare is a movement to combine BOTH Western Medicine and “Alternative” options into a more cohesive plan that gives people the information they need to help themselves, regardless of the illness, malaise, or general state of body, mind or soul.

The problem is, the only people who currently know what “integrative healthcare” entails are those that want to rebrand themselves as integrative healthcare practitioners. When I have spoken to many of my clients about keywords for their websites, they want to incorporate integrative instead of alternative as a keyword.

It is all well and good to educate your clients on the way things are moving. However, if you are aiming to bring people to your website, you must include keywords on your site that people are actually searching for.

Do you and the people in your industry use different terms than your clients to describe the same thing? It’s important to step outside of all the education you have, all the industry articles you read, and think about what someone who had no idea what you do would search for to find you. Instead of “acupuncture,” for example, someone with back pain who had never heard of acupuncture might search for “treatments for back pain.” If we were talking about SEO, fewer people might search for “SEO Services” if they had no idea what that meant and might search for “How do I rank on the first page of Google?”

An easy way to start this process is to ask someone who has no idea what you do what they would search for to find you. There are other ways to discover what people are searching for in your field as well, such as the keyword planner tool in a Google Adwords account, or of course, you could hire someone to do the keyword research for you. The advantage of this last option – if the person knows what they’re doing, of course – is that the research will also narrow down your potential keywords by competition level. So, not only will you get a list of keywords that people are searching for in your area that are related to what you offer, it will also be culled of any terms that are so competitive that you have very little chance of ranking on the first page of Google for those terms. Instead, you should be able to find a sweet spot: a list of keywords that are relevant to your business, that people are searching for in your service area (whether that’s in the town where you operate, in the United States, or globally) and that you have a chance to make it to the first page of search results for.