No matter what industry you work in, gathering target keywords can make or break your marketing campaign. Your target keywords allow you to attract your most qualified audience to your website and let Google know that you’ve created content specifically for your audience.
But before you implement your target keywords in your content, you have to find them first.
Keyword research can sometimes be a daunting task, but with the right tips and tools, you can find the perfect keywords to increase your traffic, user engagement, and search engine ranking.
Importance of keywords in content
When you conduct keyword research, you are searching, analyzing, and selecting the best keywords to use on your site and that will drive qualified traffic straight to your business. Keywords are a crucial part of optimization because they are the basis for the growth of your site.
Here are a few benefits of researching and using the right keywords for your site:
Drive qualified traffic to your website
You can drive qualified traffic to your website by optimizing for the keywords that your potential visitors are searching for.
Measure traffic potential
You can calculate your potential market size by looking at keyword popularity. If a keyword is extremely popular, that means there’s a lot of potential for traffic.
However – that probably means there’s also a lot of keyword competition, which doesn’t guarantee that just because there’s a lot of traffic around a certain keyword that you’ll be able to rank for it.
Write effective content
You can connect with searchers through plugging target keywords into your content, PPC ads, and more.
Understand user behavior
By understanding what your users are searching for, you can understand and address their needs. For example, if you sell kitchen supplies, you can find out what appliances your audience searches often and write specifically on that topic.
Keyword research
Before you start stuffing your content with keywords, you should take a step back and first do keyword research in order to ensure that the keywords you want to implement will actually drive traffic to your website.
Keyword research doesn’t need to be difficult and can actually be completed quickly and easily if you know where to start.
When creating your keyword list, there are multiple tools out there on the internet that can help you see what keywords are trending in your industry, look at other content related to your potential keywords, and even see what keywords are in popular content on social sites.
Here are some helpful sites to check out and how they can help you with your research:
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest allows you to generate and export lists of potential keywords based on your keyword ideas. You can expand on keyword suggestions to add to your keyword list and see what keywords are trending on Google Trends. The World Cloud tool also gives you a visual of your keywords, including keywords that are frequently paired with you keyword.
Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo helps you find content that is related to your keywords. You can see how often that content has been shared on social media as well as get more keyword ideas by looking at related searches.
Google Auto-Complete
You can see suggested, related and trending searches related to your keywords by utilizing Google Auto-Complete.
Soovle
Soovle looks at multiple social sites and gives you the top keyword suggestions based on each social platform.
Remember that your keyword list needs to be focused on the value that your keywords give your users. Identify your users’ intent as either:
- Navigational- looking for a site
- Informational- looking for information
- Transactional- looking to buy
Keyword optimization
Now that you have a list of keywords that are relevant to your site and your current and potential market, you can begin to focus on how to optimize your content with them.
Start by breaking down your site into segments and assign target keywords to each specific segment. It’s important to keep in mind the value and takeaways that these segments give to your users.
For example, your homepage has the most authority linked to it so use keywords here to target your brand and products or services that you offer.
For other content pages such as blogs, use keywords that focus on your sub-services and use them to reach out and answer questions for users. Use keywords here that highlight you as the authority for your product or service industry.
It’s important to remember each page on your site will rank differently, so assign your keywords accordingly.
Where you can optimize your content
Now that you’ve made your optimized keyword list for each of your sites’ topics, you’re ready to implement them into your content. But how can you do so effectively?
Focus on adding keywords the key elements of your content pages:
- Title and H1 Tags- use main keywords here at the beginning and make sure they’re visually appealing
- Body text- you’ve already figured out what keywords go within each segment so sprinkle them in among your main content; make sure not to overuse or force them as “keyword stuffing” is seen as spam
- URL- use your main keywords in the URL of your content pages; make sure they highlight the navigation that leads to your content
- Image Alt Tags- use target keywords that naturally describe your image within your content
- Internal Links- use internal linking to highlight important keywords within your content where it is most logical
- Meta Description- use keywords here to convince searchers to click on your content
Looking for More on Optimization and Inbound Marketing?
Now that your content is optimized with your target keywords, talk with the Inbound Marketing Inc. team to learn more and to take the next step towards improving your business!