After all the recent changes in algorithm updates, there were a few details in SEO that has remained important for years. Like the those specific animals in nature that didn’t need to evolve because of their resilience. Keywords.
This element of SEO has been through a lot. It came from being used to spam your way up the rankings back in the early 2000’s, to being filtered, written and used carefully in content to please Google. Keywords for us SEO’s are those words or phrases (if they’re not just singular terms) that identify what people are searching for.
Ideally, if you have a good set of well researched keywords, you can close up the distance between your content and your audience. Want people to find you and your content? You need the right set of Keywords.
But how do you really pick the best ones for you and your website?
Today, if you’re targeting terms that aren’t actually connected with your brand or service you will never go anywhere.
So the very first thing you (in the perspective of a site or business owner) will need to do is to define who you are and what are you offering in the market. Why? This will help you narrow down your set of keywords. Yes, it’s the job of agencies like us that specialise in SEO, but in today’s technology riddled business landscape, you still need to make sure that you know your niche.
For SEO’s, doing this same thing is also very important. Knowing which category a website falls to is very important. You cannot just think of random words to use. Know what this business and website is all about.
A very important example here is like:
– If you have a client (or if you’re the owner etc.) that sells pastries and cakes, you can only use keyword terms that revolve around those sweet sweets. Unless you start selling pizza and pasta, you cannot start using those for your site that only sells and specialises in cakes and pastries.
For the part of the SEOs there’s also this small thing called the Keyword Planner. Mostly for AdWords, this tool can actually also help you in checking out the average number of people that searches for specific keywords. The trick there is to choose the ones that have a good amount of people that search the web using that keyword.
Then, one thing that many cannot understand yet, -and that’s okay, we’re here for you, is that sometimes the keywords you pick, may be too short and highly used by the big hitters of the search results.
This aspect of checking the competition levels will also help you see and check whether or not you can actually rank and be seen using these keywords. If for example you’re aiming for a set of keywords that consists of terms that revolve around house curtains and you see search results that contain multiple pages going to IKEA, you know you’re aiming a bit too high. Unless of course you think you can beat IKEA, then you’re all set.
One thing you can always do or go for is to use longer terms also known as long tail keywords.
There’s art in writing and choosing these keywords. The more specific you go, the better chances you have in ranking.
cakes and pastries – meh
cakes and pastries for sale – Yes
cakes and pastries online for sale – Whoa
cakes and pastries online for sale here in Singapore – YASS
But in all seriousness, you can also use the second one and the 2 below it. Again, it all depends on that balance between the Average Search Volume numbers and the level of Competition difficulty.
At this point, we’ll also land on a subject that we all see almost every time on every blog out there right now related to SEO. Content.
See, if you have the best set of profitable keywords but your website cannot support all that, the relevance of your keywords to your website and business will start to go stale. And that spoils all that fun stuff. Good bye search traffic and ranking past IKEA.
Create content on your website that utilises all that juicy well filtered keywords. Place them on your About Us section. Make sure that when people visit your website, they know that you’re all about those homemade pastries and cakes that you and your family has been cooking since the 50’s. If you want SEO help for the site of that family business, do give us a call. We’d love to help.
And one more thing, a blog section is and forever will be very useful in all of this. Since having a blog lets you produce unique content regularly, you can also use all those keywords regularly. All this sends signals to Google that you are actively sharing information related to these keywords and themes.
Getting that set of keywords correctly isn’t really that hard. Just know what you want to sell or what you’re all about, once you realise that, the words will come out themselves.
