If you have ever thought about online marketing, SEO, Google AdWords or basically any method of promoting your business online, it is more than likely that you have come across the term ‘keywords’. What you perhaps haven’t come across is an explanation of exactly what this frequently thrown around term means, and tips on how to select the keywords that will bring the most success for your website and your business. We have put together this jargon-busting, straight-talking guide to help you find the keywords that will work hardest for your success.
When a person types a request into Google, the search engine checks across all websites submitted to find the most relevant results. Increasingly the focus of this search is on the content of the websites, and particularly the terms that match those inputted by the person making the request. These words or terms are what is meant by the term ‘keywords’, and are very important in determining where your website ends up in Google’s index.
Once we begin thinking about keywords as the terms Google will use to rank our website, it can be easy to get pulled into the trap of concentrating too much on the statistics of the keyword, and forget about what it is you are trying to sell. Keywords need to be relevant to your business, so that your website content is entertaining and interesting to read, and appears in the right searches to maximize traffic. It is also important to include your locality or region in your keyword terms – this will help attract customers with ‘near me’ searches and could help people walk into your shop, rather than the shop next door.
Once you have an idea of the kind of terms you want to be found for, it is useful to get some facts about the performance of those words in Google results. This is where a tool like rankingCoach comes in – to provide real-time Google data about each keyword and make suggestions of similar keywords that might perform better. The search volume of your keywords reflects the number of searches that have been made for that term in the past month. This means you should aim to select a keyword that has at least a higher search volume than 0, so that there is a chance someone will see your website in the indexed results. The higher the search volume, the more people are searching for this word, the higher the competition is likely to be. It is important to consider what you are offering and how niche your keywords are – highly relevant keywords with a lower search volume are more likely to bring success than general keywords with a very high search volume.
Knowing a keyword has a high level of competition is not necessarily a reason to rule it out. A highly competitive keyword (as shown by red frowny dots in rankingCoach) means many people are vying to place top for this word, so it will ultimately be much more difficult to place for. An example would be a local Peterbridge electrical appliance store trying to optimize for the term “vacuum cleaner”. The keyword “vacuum cleaner” is likely to have a very high level of competition from both large brand electrical stores and online shops like Amazon. The term “vacuum cleaner Peterbridge” is likely to have a lower search volume, but also a lower level of competition. It would therefore be more beneficial for the electrical store to optimize for the lower level of search volume and get the right customers into their store than try to compete for generic terms, that might not even attract the kind of customer they need.
You know your business inside out, so it can be easy to miss the different perspectives and approaches from which your customers arrive on your page. When choosing your keywords, it makes sense to sit back and think about what your customer is looking for. If you sell something quite specialized, it might be useful to optimize your website also for synonyms of your product, or similar items that the customers might also be interested in. This is more for less important keywords though, your top three should be to do with your product, as the customer is likely to search for it.
Once you have set your keywords in rankingCoach or decided to implement these alone, creating quality content is the next vital element of good SEO. Keep following this blog for our next article on quality content creation!