Keywords are one of the main components of every online marketing strategy. If you seek to rank higher in search engines and make some profit from your website, you really need to pay attention to your keywords and optimize your website according to the ones you have chosen. In this article, you will understand the main keyword aspects to focus on.
Pick the best keywords to achieve your goals
We know you want to optimize your website and get more traffic to it. However, we don't know why! First of all, you really need to think about what your purpose is. This is the main step that will let you select the best keywords for your site. For example, if you seek to improve your brand awareness, you may use different keywords than if you were focused on selling products to the new users visiting your website - to improve brand awareness we suggest keywords related to the values of your company while you'd better work on keywords related to your products if you want to boost your sales.
Are you in a hurry? SEO is usually a long-term process, so you also need to think about how fast you expect to get better results. If you seek to grow immediately, you may need to focus on keywords with low competition, and ideally with a pretty high research volume. Note that these types of keywords are quite difficult to find. If, on the other hand, you are planning a long-term strategy, you'd better focus on keywords with a medium competition level and high research volume, which are easier to find.
Pick the most suitable length for your keywords
As you may already know, keywords can be made of just a couple of words (black dress) or they can be long-tail keywords (elegant black dress second hand for women). Once you know your goals, you can also make a decision on the length of your keywords. Normally long-tail keywords will attract much lower research volume but with very low competition. On the other hand, short keywords, also known as head keywords, have usually higher research volume and competition.
In combination with your goals, we suggest you having a stronger focus on long-tail keywords if you are developing a short-term strategy, and strongly focusing on head keywords if your strategy is long-term based. In any case, every website needs a combination of both of these types so you will need to balance this combination to get the best results.
Make your keywords real
Once you clearly know the goals you want to achieve and the keywords strategy you need to implement for it, it's time to choose your keywords. In this step, you will need to do a bit of research on the search volume and competition for the terms in which you are interested. There are pretty handy tools like the one available in rankingCoach's free version that will allow you to know these data for each of your keywords. This is a quite easy process in which you can introduce your keywords and rankingCoach's keywords tool will show the exact research volume and competition level for each of them. Depending on these indicators, you may modify your terms to be visible for a broader audience and get rid of your competitors!
To get the most of your keywords we suggest thinking about what makes you stand out from competitors in your sector and create keywords showing how you're unique. For example, if you manage a website for an Italian restaurant locally based in Brighton, you may optimize it for keywords as "Italian restaurant Brighton" or "pasta & pizza restaurant Brighton". If you feel your differences lie in the quality of your ingredients as your meals are only cooked with organic products, you can also optimize using keywords such as "Organic Italian restaurant Brighton" or "Organic pasta & pizza restaurant Brighton". As previously mentioned, don't worry if your keywords become too long since a proper combination of head and long-tail keywords is the best strategy for your website!
And now... let's optimize it!
Once you have your keywords, you are ready, to begin with, your site's optimization!
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