Keywords play an important role in promoting your site as their inclusion in the content you post can bring you better positions in search engines and thus, more traffic to your website.
A website that is efficiently optimized for search engines "speaks the same language" as its potential visitors through keywords, which help them find your website. Keywords are the foundation of every SEO strategy.
In other words, you need to know how people are looking for products, services or information that you provide in order to optimize your website content. Therefore, Google will consider your site relevant for those keywords and it will list it higher in the results pages when a user performs a search.
This is why preparing a list of keywords is one of the first and most important steps in designing a SEO strategy for a website. Keywords and SEO optimization are directly connected when it comes to an effective SEO campaign. Because these keywords are fundamental to all SEO tactics, you should make sure that they are the most relevant for your target audience and your business, to make sure that you'll receive targeted traffic.
Choosing the right keywords is a delicate process, which is based both on science, algorithms and also on instinct.
The basic elements of a SEO keyword study are relatively easy to understand, but to conduct a keyword study which is really relevant, you need a much clearer overview of how search engines work.
We will teach you how to conduct a keyword research, how to discover what your customers are looking for and how to share with them the essence of your business. Thus, you will find those keywords that will help you have a leading position in the search engine results page (SERP) and you will be able to incorporate them into your content. If you feel that these steps are beyond you, feel free to let us do this for you.
How to find the best SEO keywords?
Many people who don`t have experience in optimizing websites or simply do not have a clear vision of the keyword research make mistakes such as:
- conducting a superficial study without considering the necessary parameters for choosing the keywords;
- not updating and not expanding the keyword list over time and not keeping up with the expansion of the market in which it operates;
- targeting too popular keywords, which means they will grow in rank extremely difficult because the competition on those keywords is fierce.
Basically, the keyword research should be constantly evolving and also an active part of the SEO strategy.
Old keywords should be regularly reevaluated and the ones with a high volume of searches (competitive keywords) can often be replaced or upgraded with more specific phrases for your work field, designed to bring the right visitors to your site.
The principles needed to be taken into consideration when doing a keyword research are:
1. The volume of searches for each keyword;
2. Your business field of activity. Identifying and targeting your exact audience are extremely important steps that need to be considered when doing a keyword research!
3. Competition on the main keywords. The more popular a keyword is, the bigger the competition is and it may take some time until you reach the top in SERP.
Last but not least, don`t forget to occasionally diversify targeted keywords. Remember this motto: diversity is a keyword in the SEO keywords universe. When you do a keyword research, ask yourself these questions: Who uses the same keywords as me? How can I stand out from the crowd? Because it will be harder to stand out if you use the same keywords as your competitors.
You should always try new tools for conducting a keyword study and to follow closely the results. Also, you should experiment and play with long tail keywords depending on your experience and your intuition. Each has a different view on SEO keywords and relative to what you should choose to be appealing to your visitors. Who knows, maybe you know the winning combination.
What tools can you use to identify the best keywords?
Since the well-known Google Keyword Planner can be used only if you have an AdWords campaign underway, we detailed in a previous article the solutions we found and tested for those who don`t have access to this tool and who want to find more keywords.
How to adapt the keywords depending on your business and how you integrate them in your web content?
Supposedly you found the best keywords and now you need to integrate them in the SEO optimization strategy, meaning to adapt the content by using the keywords in order to obtain the best results.
So how will you do that? We recommend you to include relevant keywords in important sections of your website, from titles and texts to URLs, meta tags, and image names.
On the other hand, if you want to use a wider variety of keywords, you can`t stuff it all in a few pages, descriptions and meta tags and expect to have an amazing SERP ranking. You need a very well planned SEO strategy so you won`t get lost in the plethora of keywords and tactics used.
The key lies in grouping the keywords. By splitting your keywords into small groups similar in meaning and manageable, you'll significantly reduce the working time dedicated to creating targeted pages.
For example, let`s say you own an online store dedicated to women accessories. You can group your keywords into categories such as: necklaces, earrings, rings etc.
The next step would be to segment every big category into smaller groups, such as:
- the necklaces category divided into smaller groups such as statement necklaces, gold chains, silver chains etc.
- the earrings category divided into: oversized earrings, clip earrings, gold earrings, etc.
- the rings category divided into: gold rings, silver rings, rings with precious stones etc.
Thus, you can create individual pages optimized for each group of keywords.
If you want to properly optimize your website, you should consider the following steps:
1. Use your selected keyword in the page title;
2. Use the keyword in the URL;
3. Use your selected keywords and their variations across the page;
4. Use your selected keywords in meta tags, especially in the meta description;
5. Use keywords in the images names and in the ALT text;
6. Use keywords as anchor text with links that refer to other pages on your site.
Remember, when optimizing a website, keyword relevancy is more important than their density. Providing quality and SEO optimized content, you'll have every chance you get to the first page of search engines.
