Selecting the Right Keywords

Choosing the best keywords to connect with your target audience takes time, but the results are worth the effort. The objective here is to rank highly and drive a high volume of targeted traffic to your website. Read on to discover tips on choosing the right keywords. 

Identify Your Goals

This may seem like an obvious point, but it is where you begin your journey. You must start by defining your goals for any organic or paid search effort. Knowing what you want to accomplish and determining how search influences your goals is your starting point. Defining whether you wish to grow leads, sales, engagement, or other metrics by a certain amount, will allow you to determine how many search conversions and traffic you need. This will also determine the topics and keywords to develop. 

Analyse Search Intent

When doing your keyword research, you must think about the search intent behind each query. Search intent will help you identify what keywords to select based on why people search. This search intent is often divided into three categories; navigation, information and commercial. A navigation keyword is when users use search engines to navigate to a webpage. For instance, a user may type “Facebook” into Google to reach facebook.com. An information keyword is when people use a search engine to find specific information. For instance, a user may type “who owns Facebook” if they do not know the answer to this question. A Commercial or transactional keyword suggests that a user wants to make a purchase. Terms like “buy” are strong indicators of commercial intent. Search intent enables you to plan your content in a way that meets your user’s needs. 

Think Like a Customer

Here, you must think about a potential customer’s journey from hearing about your product to making their first purchase. For most businesses, people will not make a purchase the first time they hear about your website. Some people may go through a process of different stages such as awareness, consideration and decision-making. 

Awareness occurs when a potential customer realises they have a problem. In this stage, the customer may not have a name for their problem. All they know is that they have a problem. In the consideration stage, the potential customer begins to name their problem and research a possible solution. During the decision stage, the customer takes a long list of possible solutions and decides on a course of action. As a marketer, you hope that the customer chooses your product over your competitor’s. 

When planning your content, think about your target reader and their stage in the buyer’s journey. If you sell computer keyboards, you can write a blog post targeting potential buyers in the awareness stage. However, you may end your post by asking people to sign up for a newsletter, thus targeting buyers in the decision stage. 

Use Keyword Planner Tools

One of the best ways to choose the right keywords is to know where to start. Google’s Keyword Planner tool allows you to see what keywords work and those that do not. You can access this tool within the Google Ads platform. Do not create a Pay Per Click (PPC) ad. Instead, create an account and then use the planner to enter a key phrase. The tool will show you how many users searched for that keyword over time. You will also see related phrases with associated traffic counts. Add phrases that work well with your marketing plan. This tool will help you get a list of keywords you can use in your SEO efforts. Other keyword research tools you can consider include Moz Explorer, SEMrush and Ahrefs. 

Refine Your Keywords With LSI

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is another way of saying word association. Google uses LSI to provide related results through context. This means that the search engine tries to understand your content through your keywords. Simply go to Google and type your phrase. Google will display results based on your keyword. However, these phrases will change as you continue typing. This is because Google identifies other possibilities as your long-tail search grows. The related searches will show at the bottom of the screen. Since Google identifies these associated words or semantics as essential, use them to refine your keyword list.

Analyse the Competition

Always pay close attention to the competition level of your targeted keyword phrase. The basic way to analyse the completion of your keyword is to type it into Google and see what comes up. Begin by looking at the ads. Google has websites marked with an “Ad” tag. These are paid-for ads that appear before other results. Since these websites appear on the first page of Google, it is worth assessing them before committing to creating your content. Secondly, look at websites that organically appear on the first page of Google for your target keyword. If you discover that brands with significant budgets dominate this page, it is unlikely you will take a top spot with your first blog spot. Lastly, look at the results themselves and decide whether the content is beatable. Can you create content that users will find more relevant than what is currently in the top spot? Weak content is short, poorly formatted and lacks key details. You can earn a top spot by meeting your target audience’s needs more thoroughly than your competition. 

Map Each Keyword to a Specific Page

Lastly, think about what content you will write and map each keyword to a specific page on your website. The correct content goes beyond choosing either text, audio, or video. You must also consider expressing it in graphs, lists, tables, charts, maps and images. After you have your content ready, it is time to map your keywords to specific pages. The best way to do this is through a content schedule. This schedule will keep you organised through a long marketing campaign and it can stop you from targeting the same keyword on different pages on your website. A crucial thing to remember is that websites do not rank; web pages do. As such, ensure that each web page targets a different keyword.