Choosing the Right Keywords
Keywords aren’t just about the content on your website. They’re also about the users searching online and what they’re looking for. To choose the best keywords, you’ll need to understand your visitors:
- What brings them to your site?
- What language do they use to search?
- What kind of content are they looking for?
Search for Your Keyword
Because keywords are so important to driving traffic to your website, keyword research is one of the most valuable activities in marketing. The first step in keyword research is to search for your sample keywords on a search engine (Google is recommended because it is the most visited search engine in the world and as of 2018 has 77% of all search traffic in the United States). You can see what other results come up and what competitors may be doing.
If there are multiple adwords listings at the top of the search results page (SERP), that keyword is likely to be very valuable. If your keyword is valuable, then it could potentially drive a lot of traffic to your site, but it’s also difficult to place highly in search rankings.
Google Adwords Campaign
Searching for your keyword can provide a lot of valuable information, but it cannot tell you how well it will work for driving traffic to your website and content. To test out how a keyword works for your site, buy a sample Adword campaign for Google (or the equivalent for your preferred search engine, such as Adcenter for Bing). You can then track impressions and your conversion rate to see how well that keyword performs.
Resources for Keyword Research
There are fortunately a lot of free resources that can help you in coming up with keywords. Google provides several, including Google Keyword Planner, which is a part of Google Adwords, and Google Trends, where you can search for your keyword, see the number of people searching for that keyword, where in the world they’re searching from, and what topics and keywords are similar. Other resources include:
- Google Correlate
- Answer the Public
- Keywords Everywhere
- Adword & SEO Keyword Permutation Generator
- Wordtracker Scout
- Google Search Console
- Wordtracker
Long-Tail Keywords
When researching keywords, something to consider is that the days of single-word keywords are mostly numbered. [tweetshareinline tweet=”Single keywords tend to be vague and have such a broad range that while they may be relevant, they may not engage the type of visitors you’re looking for. ” username=”BrainVineSEO”]For example, if your main keyword is panda (the Google update), and you rank highly for that keyword, a lot of your traffic may end up being users who are looking for pandas (the adorable Chinese bears), which isn’t the type of traffic that will benefit you.
Instead, consider using long-tail keywords, or keyphrases. Many people, especially through voice search, which is becoming increasingly popular, search by asking a question or typing in a phrase. This can also help narrow down your audience so it’s easier to ensure that you’re getting relevant traffic.
LSI Keywords
It’s also important to make sure you’re using LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords, which are all of the words related to your keyword that you would expect to see come up in the content. For example, if your main keyword is panda, you would expect to see the LSI keywords of bamboo, China, and zoo.
Google actually uses LSI keywords to determine the authenticity of a page – if it sees words within the content that are related to the page’s keywords, then it considers the site to be genuine and can actually boost the search rankings. There are some free resources you can use to determine LSI keywords that can be used alongside your main keywords or phrases.
Keyword Maintenance
Unfortunately, the work of keyword research is never finished. [tweetshareinline tweet=”Staying on top of keyword trends and ensuring that you are using the keywords that will perform best for your site requires frequent maintenance and regular re-evaluation.” username=”BrainVineSEO”] The language used to perform searches changes constantly and there are always new keywords being coined. Whether you’re producing a new post or page or maintaining an existing one, it can benefit your site and your search rankings to revisit these keyword research steps to make sure you’re staying on top of your keyword game.
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