Optimising keywords for SEO
Optimising your keywords is necessary to boost your search engine rankings. Most marketers understand this even if at a basic level. But, knowing how to choose keywords for SEO that’ll maximise ROI and get you the best return for your efforts can be a whole lot more difficult. Keyword selection should not be a stab in the dark – so here’s how to be more specific and on-point with your selection.
- Do your research
When you first begin optimising keywords for SEO don’t be too rigid in your approach. The best way to start is to ask stakeholders such as salespeople, the marketing department and customers what they would search to find your business, service or content. It’s important to ask people that aren’t completely embroiled in your project as they’re likely to give you a much more realistic response in comparison to people who know you want to rank for ‘florists in Manchester’ or ‘web development services.’ Create a list of what you’re hearing and keep these search terms on your radar.
- Check out the competition
If your competitors are outranking you, yet offer very similar services or content, it’s time to delve deeper into their content marketing strategy and the keywords used. Essentially, keywords help to identify whether content is relevant to a search, or not. So, if you’re competition is outperforming your efforts, check out their title and meta description tags. What are the keywords being used and are they long or short tail? Perhaps they’re location specific? Check out the page topics across the site and how they’ve used keywords in their sitemap. Note down anything important.
- Use keyword research tools
Finding the right keywords means using relevant tools. There are many available these days that will provide a keyword list complete with backup data such as the monthly search volume for each term. Examples of tools you can used include KWFinder, Ahrefs, LongTailPro, Google Keyword Planner and more. You’ll be presented with many keywords but choose a selection of short-term and long-term keywords focusing on natural speech terms, which will be useful for voice searches. So, instead of trying to incorporate clunky SEO terms, think about how someone might carry out a search query and use this to shape your content. SEO optimised questions are becoming increasingly important.
- Identify topics
The more research you do, the more you’ll start to notice themes and topics. The good news is; topics are more important than keywords in many ways as you’re more likely to build a page around as specific topic that incorporates numerous keywords than loads of individual words.
Identifying topics is great for many reasons as it will help you to see how existing content can be improved through optimising your keywords. It’ll also help you to notice content gaps where you’ve not optimised at all for a relevant topic or theme. Once you’ve noticed this, you can start to plan future content development to help boost your SEO ranking.
Top tip: Make sure your topics and keywords are closely related to your products and services and drive people to take action.
- Review the SERPs
One of the most frustrating aspects of keyword research is that even the most popular search terms might not be good enough to get you ranking on the first page. This is because the marketplace for these words might be flooded. So, check out the search engine results pages (SERPs) to see what’s going on. Do this by typing in a few of the keyword examples you’re thinking of using. It might be that you have to mix super popular words with those which are less popular to help stand out from the crowd.
If you’re looking for local SEO services, contact Whitefish Marketing today.
