In last week’s blog, we talked about the importance of building quality, incoming links as a way of boosting your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) efforts, climbing the ranks of Google and in turn, making it easier for your potential customers to find your website.
This time, let’s take you back a step to one of the fundamentals of SEO success – keywords, and more specifically keyword research.
I’m sure you’ve all heard of a keyword – aka the words that get typed into a search box by a prospective customer.
Making sure that you rank for the ‘right’ keywords can make or break your website. And keep in mind that it’s not all about getting as many visitors as possible to your website – you want the right kind of visitors.
Keyword research is definitely not a case of set and forget – you need to continually manage your precious keywords in order for your SEO efforts to really make a difference.
So put your detective hat and discover your market’s and company’s keywords and their demand, and how to build your list of terms and phrases to target. great byproduct of keyword research is learning a lot more about your existing and prospective customers along the way too.
Finding the right keywords for your site
#1 Put your thinking cap on
Before you get into the online resources, sit down and draft an initial list of keywords that you think you may want to go after. Start simple. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and think about what they might type in to get to you. Don’t forget to include obvious keywords that are most relevant to your business and words and/or phrases that pertain to your industry.
#2 Get suggestions from online tools
While you don’t want a keyword list that contains hundreds of words, including many that are unattainable or unrealistic, you definitely want to use a couple of keyword suggestion tools. You’ll most likely discover keywords and phrases you may not have thought of.
Google’s Adwords Keyword tool is a common starting point for SEO keyword researchers as it can suggest keywords, provide you with estimates on search volumes and also predict the cost of running paid campaigns for the terms.
Wordtracker is another popular tool and others such as those listed below are available – just keep in mind that not all online tools are free!
#3 Discover how well your site is currently ranking.
There are a number of valuable tools available on the Internet that allow you to find out how well your website is ranking – one of our favourites at Biz Eez is WooRank. You’ll get information about where your site currently falls within searches as well as which keywords rank for your site.
If you already rank for particular keywords, you have yourself a starting point – you can focus on improving your rank with those, particularly if you can see in your own website statistics that they’re keywords that convert well.
But don’t stop there. Chances are you’ll need to look at optimizing your site for new, additional keywords in order to truly move up the ranks on Google and other search engines.
#4 Finalize and prioritize.
Ok, so you’ve done your internal and online keyword resesarch and found out well you currently rank – now its time to create your final list and prioritize.
Sort your list by assigning a priority percentage to each keyword – the most relevant keywords need the highest percentage and the least relevant keyword get assigned the lowest percentage. Put simply – what percentage of customers are searching for each particular word or phrase? (It’s not likely to be 100% for any of your keywords!)
#5 Don’t just set and forget!
After you’ve chosen your keywords and launched into your new SEO efforts, the most important thing you can do is measure, analyse and revise.
Keep a close eye on how well your new keywords are performing, asking yourself questions such as:
- Which keywords generate the most traffic?
- Which keywords are underperforming, overperforming and hitting the mark?
- What trends can I see, good and bad?
As a final note, remember that just like we said when talking about building links – successful SEO takes time, patience and your attention.
But it’s all worth it, particularly when you notice all the traffic to your website!
Until next time…..
