Keywords are the words and phrases in your web content that results in people finding your site using search engines. The better you optimize your page the easier it is your potential audience to find your products and services. Tapping into how people search for what you offer, will help your site rank higher in search results.
Developing a list of keywords is the bedrock of your marketing campaign and worth investing the time to confirm that your SEO keywords are relevant to your audience. This will be an evolving process as the significance of particular words waxes and wanes.
For example, if you’re a high-end bakery with a variety of confections, good keywords could be cakes, cookies, scones and dessert bread strategically placed in your titles and throughout the content. By just implementing the words baked goods, baked food and baked products, you have defined for your audience that you are a baker. That covers a lot of territory. You may not appear in the results of a bride-to-be searching for a wedding cake. You might, instead, choose to sharpen the focus to types of cakes, (wedding cakes, birthday cakes, anniversary cakes) or types of confections (orange-cranberry scones, specific kinds of cookies) or particular kinds of bread (sweet bread, 14-grain, olive and rosemary bread.)
Don’t arbitrarily overstuff content with keywords, but do have them well placed on your page. Here’s a quick checklist of where to place them:
• The title of your page
• The header of your page
• As close to the first and last sentences of content as possible.
• Make them part of your URL.
Take the guesswork out and build your optimization strategies around real and actionable data. Understanding what your audience is searching for is a major component to white-hat SEO which prevents your website being banned. Keyword research strikes the right balance between competition, cost and potential. You might even want to read Qamar Zaman’s article on SEO to understand the current trend of long-tail keywords.
When your audience engages, it equals links and referrals. The more Backlinks you have pointing to your site the more relevant and trusted your website will be, as measured by search engines like Google. You might check out Google Alerts to find out when competitors are mentioned online and study how they’re building audience engagement by monitoring keywords. Tools like Google’s Keyword Planner and Keyword Tool are great for researching different keywords that may relate to your product, service or industry.
What’s working for you right now? We’d love to hear from you!
See the next installment of this series: Attract and Retain Web Traffic
We are committed to immersing ourselves in your business to understand your most pressing goals. We take systematic approach to ensure our solutions add real value to your customer and organization's success
Crafting digital and automated experiences from idea to implementation with UX, Product Design, Full-stack Development, and AI Agents.
