The Importance Of Keyword Research For Your Website
In the online world, people don’t just stumble upon websites, but instead search for a product, service or content they need. To be visible to your target audience, you need to start using the right keywords – ideally the same ones they’d be typing in the search engine. Keyword research is a process of realizing the value of search terms and putting it against its competitiveness. The end goal, of course, is to help increase the traffic on your website. This guide will try to showcase the importance of keyword research for any website that strives to get more traffic.
Understanding Keywords
Before you throw yourself onto researching keywords for your website, try to understand the concept first. There are two important principles when it comes to keywords: traffic and competitiveness. Keyword traffic is the number of people who search for a certain keyword on a daily basis. Competitiveness is the number of sites that are fighting to rank well with this keyword. It may seem to make sense to go with the keywords with more traffic, but actually, that’s not the case. This is because it’s much harder to rank for keywords that are highly competitive. Instead, the idea is to find a low competitive search term, even if it packs less traffic. Be the king of the den, instead of being nobody in the castle.
The Importance of Long-Tail Keywords
While a regular keyword would be, for example, “lawyer”, the long-tail keyword is much more specific and would be something like “Chicago lawyer specialized in bankruptcy”. These longer keywords are much easier to rank for, since most people aren’t optimizing their websites for longer phrases. And even if they are, it’s less likely that they will match with yours. Long-tail keywords have way less search traffic, but you’re almost certain to rank well for them. And they’ll still bring a good amount of traffic to your website. What’s more, it will largely be partially pre-qualified traffic, with lower competition.
Adding Keywords To Your Page Title
Since search engine algorithms give priority to the content written in title tags, you should keep your keywords there if you want to rank higher. When someone types in keywords, most will just browse headlines on the SERP. Some will also look at the meta-description. It’s incredibly important to have a well-written title tag with your keywords included in it, because it’s what first catches the eye of browsers.
Finding Your Keywords
Figuring out the keywords that go with your business and are aimed at your target audience can be a difficult process. The easy path would be to hire a reputable SEO company to manage your keywords and SEO. But if you’re looking to do it on your own, here are two simple tips.
- Primary keywords – To find the keywords that are integral to your business, you need to understand what phrases your potential visitors might use to find you. When you’ve got your primary keywords figured out, you can start building long-tail keywords around them.
- Auto-suggest – By now, surely all search engines have a built-in suggestion system. So when you start typing a certain word, most commonly used terms show up. This is a great way to figure out some possible search-terms you might have missed, and people often use.
Keyword Density and Placement
When search engine bots crawl through your page, they try to determine which keywords your page should rank for based on keyword density. While it’s important to target through keywords, you need to stay as far away as possible from keyword stuffing. This is a term for the overuse of keywords on any webpage. And it is heavily penalized by Google! The ideal density of a keyword varies according to the source. Yoast, perhaps the most widely respected authority on blog post analysis, recommends between 0.5% and 2.5% in each article. You can also target more than one keyword. But since we’ve already covered long-tail keywords, you will probably rank for them as well. This bears repeating: Please be careful not to overdo the keywords and be penalized for keyword stuffing.
Keyword Research Takeaways
SEO is integral to the success of any business. And keywords are a major part of it. If you’re looking to be visible online, understanding keywords and knowing how to research them is very important. If you use them properly, you can significantly increase your business. If you master your long-tail keyword research, you’ll not only get more traffic, but you’ll also get more visitors that are further along in the buying circle. This is exactly why these searches are so important. And once you’ve established your keywords, don’t forget to optimize your whole website to be more SEO friendly.
What Do You Think?
Do you have any comments to add, that you feel could help readers? We’d love it if you’d share.
Additional resources: Your Complete Content Plan Part 1: Keyword Research
A great external resource for tools, from Authority Hacker: What Is The Best Keyword Research Tool in 2017
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Helen Bradford
Latest posts by Helen Bradford (see all)
- The Importance Of Keyword Research For Your Website - August 2, 2017
