Start with keyword research first
Keyword research is the foundation of just about everything that you will be doing with your website. If you’re not doing it right then you are setting yourself up to fail.
If you don’t want your content to be pushing up daises then read on.
First things first
Let’s lay some ground word before we begin. If this is just a refresher for you, feel free to jump on down to the next section. But if you don’t know a keyword from a hole in the ground, keep reading.
First, what is a “keyword”?
Put simply, a keyword is anything that you type into a search engine like Google to find something.
“Plumbers near me” is one example of a keyword that we have previously touched on, and there are billions of possible keywords that can be searched for, and Google sees new keywords daily.
Keywords are often broken down into two kinds, “Head” and “Long tail” keywords.
This terminology stems from graphs, like the one below that shows that most keywords are short in the number of words that they use vs their search volume.
However, these high volume and short keywords are very often the ones that don’t convert unless it’s for a one-word brand name like Nike.
Bigger is not better
The biggest mistake you can make is targeting the wrong keywords based on volume alone.
Targeting the wrong keywords is a massive problem for business, throwing money down the drain chasing keywords and phrases that don’t result in sales or conversions.
Big search volume must mean big money, right?
No.
Let’s break this down.
According to Google’s Keyword planning tool, “Plumbing” has almost one million monthly searches. This sounds great, I’d love to rank for plumbing and get a ton of traffic.
However, think about this, how much of that traffic is ready to buy something? The searcher could be looking for general information about the history of plumbing. They could be looking for a plumber, but maybe they are doing research on different kinds of plumbing. Simply ranking for a keyword that is so general in its intent, or what the person searching for wants to get, is not the most optimal strategy.
Instead, a plumbing company should be ranking for keywords that have a more obvious focus on making a purchase.
A keyword like “emergency plumber” which has a similar volume would be a much better keyword to rank for, as it signals that the searcher probably has an immediate problem that needs to be solved.
Proper keyword research, the process of deciding what keywords to try and rank for with your website, is fundamental to being successful and should be done, ideally before you even begin to build your website.
Well, done keyword research should be informing everything from the content on your website to how you lay out its structure. But, if you already have your website built out, you can still leverage good keyword research to inform what you do with your website.
Doing Keyword Research, the Right Way
One of the best things that you can do is get away from “keyword research” tools. These can give you great information about how many people are searching for a given search term and how much competition there is for it, but these can easily be a trap where you start targeting the same keywords as everyone else.
The following steps will keep you from targeting the same keywords as everyone else and will help you to create a list of keywords to target for your business or website that will be valuable to you.
Think About the Buyer Journey for Keyword Ideas
- This is the general stages that a potential customer for your business will go through as they go from the initial awareness of a problem and move on to making a purchase decision.
- This is referred to as the “buyer journey” and this breaks down into three general stages.
- The awareness stage.
- First consider what problems does your product solve?
- Write those down in a list.
- Next consider what questions you might be asking when you first become aware of a problem that your product or services solves.
- These will be very general and vague, often not directly related to your products or services, but still connected to them.
- For a plumber you might want to be asking questions like:
- “Why is my faucet dripping when off?”
- “Why is my sink getting clogged?”
- “Why am I not getting hot water quickly?”
- For a book seller company:
- “What are some good new fantasy books?”
- “What are some of the best classic books to read as an adult?”
- For a dermatologist:
- “Why do I keep breaking out?”
- “Is it normal to have zits as an adult?”
- The consideration stage.
- Next consider what questions or things that someone who has identified a specific problem is looking to find out.
- For an auto body shop:
- “How do I treat rust spots?”
- “How do I get rid of a dent?”
- For a mechanic:
- “How do I replace an alternator on a 96’ Subaru Legacy?”
- “How do I replace the clutch on a 2001 BMW 525i?”
- For a sign printer:
- “What is the best kind of outdoor sign?”
- “What is the best thing to hand out at an industry convention?”
- The decision stage.
- The awareness stage.
- Now consider what kinds of questions you might have when you are ready to make a purchase.
- For a shoe store:
- “What is the best place to buy men’s new balance shoes?”
- “How much do men’s penny loafers’ cost?”
- For an art supply store:
- “Where can I buy Prismacolor pencils near me?”
- “Where can I buy watercolor paper near me?”
- For an electrician:
- “How much do electricians’ cost?”
- “Lighting installers near me”
- For a shoe store:
- If you do this for every product or service that you offer, you’ll have a solid list of topics to write about, make images explaining, or record videos talking about.
Unique Angles for Keyword Ideas
- Think about your products or services and write down answers to the following questions.
- What are the main features that it has?
- What are the main benefits that it has?
- What problems is it solving?
- What words could you use to describe the product or service?
- What qualifying words could you use to help you narrow down to an ideal customer?
- Words that are specific to the demographics of your ideal customer
- This could be “moms over 40” or “single men”.
- Who is your product or service “for”?
- Is there any information, things, or words that you can mention about your products or services that is very specific to your product or service
- Search for similar products or services
- What kinds of words do they use to describe their products or services
- Are there any patterns or words that keep coming up over and over?
- Look at Google search suggestions at the bottom of the results.
- Note down these related searches.
- With both exercises complete you should have a very comprehensive list of keywords that are not only related to your product or service, but also the things that your customers will be searching for as they move from awareness of a problem to looking for where to buy the solution to it.
Keyword Research Tools
- With this initial brainstorming session done, you can start to rank keywords by different metrics using various tools
- Tools
- Google Keyword Planner
- SEMRush
- WordStream
- Moz Keyword Explorer
- Free Keyword Research Tool
- Tools
- Some of the metrics that you might see
- Volume – The number of searches, usually per month.
- Difficulty – How difficult it might be to rank for a given keyword
- Organic Click Through Rate – How often searchers will actually click on a result
- Making your own data
- You might run into some keywords that you have come up with that don’t have any data for them. Especially if you are using tools like Google Keyword Planner.
- You can get an idea of how difficult a keyword is using some math and some advanced Google Searches
- Google your keyword in quotes and note down the number of results you’ll probably have to click on “Tools” to see the number of results.
- Note the number of results
- Use the following search – replacing [keyword] with your keyword but keeping the quotation marks.
- Inurl: “[keyword]” AND intitle: “[keyword]”
- Note the number of results from this search.
- Divide the number of results from this search by the number of results from your first search.
- Formula:
- (inurl: “[keyword]” AND intitle: “[keyword]” – number of results) divided by (“[keyword]” – number of results) = potential difficulty of the keyword to rank for.
- This number will give you a decimal value, the closer the number is to 1 the more SEO work has gone into ranking for this keyword.
- Example “plumber”
- 98200000/2750000=0.028
Using your keywords properly
Ok, now you have some keywords that you can aim different kinds of articles and posts on your website at. But how do you use those keywords correctly?
Using keywords improperly is a great way to rank lower, and get no traffic and no sales from Google
First and foremost, when writing for your blog, use keywords naturally, as if you were speaking to someone face to face. This keeps your content from sounding robotic or unnatural. Low quality SEO efforts will, occasionally, still try this tactic of repeating keywords as frequently as possible, also known as keyword stuffing.
Previously I talked about this exact kind of issue, and I’ll say it again. Simply using the same keyword repeatedly does not produce the results that you want.
Instead, you should be using the keyword and related words and terms naturally throughout the body of the text.
In places such as your
- Title
- headings (the text that breaks up each section of a page)
- URLs (the text that you put into a web browser to go to a specific web page on a site (such as www.example.com/your-really-cool-web-page)
- Meta description (not always seen by humans, but instead read by search engines like Google)
In some places such as your URL some words in a longer keyword, called stop words, may be omitted to keep the URL from becoming too long. The normal list of stop words in English includes: a, an, and, are, as, at, be, but, by, for, if, in, into, is, it, no, not, of, on, or, such, that, the, their, then, there, these, they, this, to, was, will, and with.
- Use one page on your website to target a specific keyword.
- Use that keyword naturally in the title of the page.
- Use that keyword naturally in your headings.
- Use that keyword naturally in meta description.
- Use that keyword in the URL – most modern website management software, like WordPress, will generate the URL based on your title automatically.
Wrapping up
It’s easy to get lost in the various tools and terms that are used but doing keyword research does not have to be overwhelming.
Brainstorm what your customers will be thinking about as they move from problem to purchase.
Create content that is helpful to them at each step.
Use tools to find out more information about search volume, difficulty, and look to verify that your content matches their intent.
Naturally incorporate your targeted keywords into your content as if you are speaking to someone.
Armed with all of this you’ll have a leg up on the competition and be able to create useful content that shines for your visitors. Turning them from window shoppers to buyers.
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