Choosing the right keywords and keyword phrases is very essential, if you want to drive the right kind of traffic to your website.
Keywords are nothing but the words that your target audience will use, to look for information about businesses like you. You have to understand the intent behind the use of such keywords or keyword phrases before using any of them to optimize your content. If you fail to do this, you will only end up using the wrong keywords that do nothing to increase your conversions.
Here is a list of things you can do to pick the right keywords for your business:
#1. Think from a customer’s point of view
Think what words you would type into Google if you wanted to find any of the products or services that your business offers. Talk to your friends, family members, colleagues or even existing customers about your products and services and find out what words they would use to search for them. This should give you a raw list of keywords that you can later tweak for better optimization.
#2. Analyze your competition
An easier way to identify the keywords you should be using to optimize your business is to find out what keywords your competitors have been targeting. You should be able to identify these by going through their content and having a look at their metatags. In case you have missed out on a few things, this should help in broadening your list.
#3. Consider including long-tail keywords
You can combine two or three keywords that you already have in your list and come up with long-tail keywords to optimize your content. These keywords may not have high search volumes; but the traffic that they attract would be more relevant to your business. Also, since they are less competitive, ranking on them should be a whole lot easier. Make sure the long tail keywords that you use, are very specific to your products or services.
#4. Check Out a Few Keyword Research Tools
There are many Keyword Research Tools such as Google Keyword Planner, SEMRUSH, Ahrefs, LongTailPro, and KWFinder that you can use to look up your potential target keywords. Enter each of the keywords you have gathered in your list, into these tools, to determine their volume and competition. This will give you a few more keywords that you can use to rank your pages higher on the search engines.
#5. Measure your results
Identifying the keywords and using them to optimize your content is great; but your work doesn’t stop there. You will have to monitor the ranking of the webpage that you have optimized with these keywords. There are many tools you can use for keyword rank monitoring. Keep track of the trending keywords and keyword phrases in your niche. See if your competitors have started targeting any new keywords.
These steps should help you in identifying the right keywords for your business. Once you have a list of keywords, make sure you use them wherever possible. You can include them in the content of your website, in your blog posts, and in your social media posts. Make it as convenient as possible for your target audience to find you.