I hate to break it to you, but if you’re trying to tackle keywords yourself – you’re probably doing it wrong.
Keywords are a huge part of the world of SEO, and of being found online. If you want to stand out online, and more importantly to show up in Google search results, then you need to have a keyword strategy. The problem is, a lot of business owners won’t have the budget or the time to hire an SEO specialist, and so they will take the DIY approach. And if you have the time to research it properly that can work out OK, but other times it can do more harm than good. So today, I wanted to go do a basic guide to what keywords are, why they matter, and how to choose and use them in a way that will do your business some good.
What Are Keywords?
In simple terms, keywords are the words people use when searching on Google. A user enters a word or phrase, and Google compiles a list of results that match that word or phrase. They are Google’s way of figuring out what its users want to see. Anything searched on a search engine, whether it’s a single word or a phrase, is considered a keyword.
For a website owner or SEO professional, keywords are used to optimise a website, in the hopes of appearing higher in the Google results for specific terms. For example, a company selling trainers would likely use the keyword ‘trainers’, and optimise their website around it to get the best results.
Why Are They Important?
Keywords are important because they are what helps you ‘win’ at Google. They can be targeted with marketing, and manipulated to showcase your website to potential customers on Google. When your website is listed at the top of the results for a search, that keyword is acting as a free source of website traffic, attracting and guiding people to your site and, hopefully, to purchase. If you have a bit of a budget, you can pay for ads on specific keywords to help boost that traffic. That’s how Google Ads works – advertisers bid for the space at the top of the results page for their specific keywords.
As you develop a marketing and advertising strategy for your business, you will need to choose specific keywords to target with your website, so you can drive the right kind of traffic and hopefully get more sales. Without a good keyword strategy, you might struggle to build awareness online.
How Do You Choose The Right Keywords?
How you choose your keywords is just as important as what they are. I come across far too many business owners who have just chosen a few random words about their business, and decided to use those as keywords. And while they might sometimes stumble across one that works, most of the time this strategy doesn’t yield any results. Instead, you need to choose your keywords carefully. A few of the things you need to consider when choosing your keywords are:
- Search volume (how many times the keyword is searched)
- Competition (How many other sites are competing for that keyword)
- Price (Cost per click)
- Word count (the number of words in the phrase)
- Intent (what the searcher is intending to do)
There are a number of ways you can get this information. If you want to, and you’re feeling flush, you can pay for a service like SEMRush, who specialise in providing SEO information and tools, for a hefty price. Personally, I prefer to use the Google AdWords tool. This is a free tool, and just by entering a few pieces of basic information about your business you will be presented with all of this information, and some keyword suggestions to get you started.
How Do You Use Keywords?
Once you’ve got your nice shortlist of keywords, it’s time to start using them! This is where the golden trio of Google come in – SEO, Content Marketing and PPC advertising. The simplest way to use your keywords is to make sure that your website content, from the page titles, main text, categories and all of your sub-pages, are written in the same way that your audience writes their search engine queries. This way you have the best chance of matching what they’re searching.
You can boost this by writing blog posts around your keywords, using them in the right density to appeal to Google (which is around 1-2 times per 100 words by the way). If you’re running a specific campaign, create a landing page that’s optimised with campaign-specific keywords to boost your chances of being found. Make sure all of your meta-data includes your keywords, and keep your keyword list updated as you go.
Of course, this is very much just a surface-level guide to keywords. But hopefully it’s given you a better idea of what keywords are all about, along with some ideas on how to use them moving forward. Now, I don’t claim to be an SEO expert, but I do work in content, which means I need to understand how keywords work, and how to use them in my client’s content so that it has the best possible chance at success. If you want to know more about how I do that (including choosing blog topics that will boost your SEO), then feel free to get in touch with me today.