An Awesome Video from Yoast about Finding Keywords
Below is a simple video from Yoast discussing how you can find keywords that help you rank online. If you need any professional help with your local SEO please feel free to contact Whitefish Marketing on 01303 720 288. We offer a free and no-obligation consultation discovery call to see how we can help improve your SEO. Now… onwards with the video!!
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Yi6GKjzXfE
Video Transcript:
“In the previous video, you learned about what keywords are and why they are important. In this video, we’ll discuss the various factors you have to take into account when doing keyword research and setting up your keyword strategy. We’ll discuss your mission, your audience, and your competition. Before you do anything, and this is key, you need to know what makes your company unique. You need to have a clear concept of the mission of your company and what you have to offer, because that is what is going to make you rank. It’s that simple. SEO is just like regular business. If you’re doing everything on the same or inferior level as your competition, you’re not going to stand out. If you’re not the best result, why should people want to find you? Why should Google rank you? It seems simple, but this factor is often forgotten.
We often hear people say, “We can’t come up with meaningful keywords.” If you struggle with that, take a step back and look at your business at large. What do you have to offer? What is your mission? What are your core values and strengths? How can you branch out from your core selling points to very specific bits of information or service which you can use to stand out from the crowd? You don’t have to be better than your competition at everything, as long as you identify enough things to build a keyword strategy around. For smaller companies, this means that you probably have to be better at the things bigger fish haven’t thought of, or actually aren’t actively looking to do. If you can’t come up with anything, you have bigger problems than just coming up with keywords.
Once you’ve determined what you have to offer, it’s time to consider your audience. In the end, SEO is all about making sure your users are able to find you. So the first thing you have to do is to find out what words your potential audience uses to find the information they are looking for. Let’s consider an example. At Yoast, we think of a course’s platform as Yoast Academy, so at first sight, it seems very logical for us to optimize for the keyword Yoast Academy. However, when we analyze traffic data, it turns out that our audience uses Yoast courses way more, so it makes much more sense to optimize for that term. Every company has its own internal vocabulary, which often doesn’t match the vocabulary of its audience. Therefore, you should always choose your keywords from the perspective of your audience. You can use Google Trends to research how often search terms are used compared to other terms.
Lastly, you simply can’t devise a proper keyword research strategy without taking your competition into account. Too often, websites optimize for terms they have absolutely no chance ranking for, so you need to research your competition. You can go all overboard and make a thorough analysis of the competitors in your field, and that can certainly be worthwhile, but let’s stick to the basics for now. It’s quite easy to get a general idea of your SEO competition. Just Google some search terms you would like to rank for and see what companies show up and where you rank.
How big are the companies you are competing with for top three rankings? Would your company fit between these results? This is all quite easy to determine using just the Google search results. But be wary, you can’t just trust the search results, because Google tailors them to your search history. So logically, your site is going to come up higher for you than for others. You can use an incognito screen to circumvent this, although there’s still a local search component even in an incognito screen. If that is a problem for you, you should consider using VPNs to mask your location.
Big sites can rank for the most general terms, and smaller sites within a very specific niche can do the same. Of course, it’s also easier if you’re writing in a language that is not spoken all over the world. For most smaller sites writing in English however, the general rule of thumb is this. Start with a big set of long tail keywords which have little traffic but you can rank for more easily, and then work yourself up in the ranking, step by step. Once you’ve gained some SEO authority, start optimizing for more general keywords, and in the end, maybe you will even be able to rank for head keywords.
Hey, you now know a lot more about keywords, but you’re not going to learn how to do good keyword research from a video alone. Want to take the first step without having to break the bank? Take our free SEO for beginners training. It has additional reading materials, quizzes, and other tools that help you to actually practice your new skills. When you complete the training, you’ll also receive an official Yoast certificate of completion and a discount for our other training courses, including our keyword research course. Check out the full course in the description below.”
