Finding The Right Keywords
In our previous article we spoke about how important it is to use keywords and keyword phrases with strategy while building your website. Remembering that keywords are the bread and butter of the operation will help new and advanced webmasters alike when choosing which to use. You can use keywords to gain many visitors, but the true focus should be gaining visitors that actually have an interest in what you’re offering. You can use keyword search tools in your research such as the one located on this site (SEO Tools) as this will help you chose the most valuable keywords. Using the research tool as an example, simply plug in a search term or keyword and receive a full analysis overview for the search term you have chosen. Another popular tool is Search Trends by Google: (https://trends.google.com/trends/) this can also help you determine which keywords have value.
Understanding Customer Psychology
Imagine a user sitting down at their computer to search for the product or service that you provide. Can you be for certain that sending them to your website will end up a conversion? How can you be sure that their visit will end up a profit or a sale for you? Well, this can be done by using search terms as a way of understanding customer psychology. Using the tools we have previously talked about, we can see how many users are searching for a particular key phrase, and we can also see how many of the searches turn into conversions. Now we simply need to match our keywords to target the desired audience. This means tweaking our key phrases to attract visitors that are ready to buy.
Over Optimizing With Keywords
Targeted yet natural is the key, any attempt at over doing it can be considered keyword stuffing and potentially get your website labeled as spam. When writing your article, you will want to use your previously chosen targeted keywords as your subject. You will then want to write your article around those keywords, yet completely natural. Your article should flow and your keywords should be placed naturally, not overly noticeable. Usually used once in the title, as apart of the URL and naturally placed a few times within the article will be enough. As said, you will want to be careful not to get your website labeled as spam!
When trying to find the best keywords, short, highly competitive phrases vs long tail, low volume, yet highly targeted phrases can be the difference between making or breaking your online venture. In simple terms, there are two main types of keywords, broad and targeted. Broad keywords get a much higher number of daily searches but can be impossible to rank for due to very high competition. However, you can take some of the traffic from your high ranking competitors, by using long tail phrases. Long tail keywords are much more specific and relevant to what you are offering, yet easier to rank for due to the nature of them being so specific. From the previous example of a shoe sale, the search term “shoe sale” is considered broad, while the “Adidas shoe sale” is a form of long-tail. Along with being more targeted to what your visitor may be searching for, using long tail keywords gives an unestablished website a much better chance of ranking within the top 10. You can delve deeper by Geotargeting as well. This simply means using keywords based on a customer’s geolocation (City, State, Country). An example of this would be, “Top US Wedding Photographers” vs the more general list of “Top Wedding Photographers” which may return a result for the top wedding photographers worldwide. Someone who markets only to California may wish to geo-target even further to “Top Wedding Photographers in California” narrowing down the search results even further, greatly cutting out many of the otherwise competing websites in the search results.
What To Do With Your Research Findings
Keyword search tools are great for helping webmasters pinpoint trends of the typical web user but these tools will not literally tell you how to use these keywords to receive conversions. It is up to you to use the information that these tools provide to make them work for you. Start by assessing the value of the keywords that you wish to use.
Does this keyword or keyword phrase truly apply to your website or content?
Is it realistic to rank for this keyword and what is the competition like?
Is there a long tail keyword that may be better targeted to reach your audience?
Ranking a website is not an easy task, and can be very time-consuming. This is especially true when starting a new site, as it does take a lot of patients. If in the meantime the above is true but you are still not ranking as well, or as fast as you had hoped, you can purchase ad campaigns based on your keywords to potentially turn that paid traffic into conversions. This is called CPV or PPV Contextual Advertising.
