A company’s website serves a multitude of purposes, from capturing leads to creating brand trust and loyalty and more. However, there’s one necessary element to achieve any of those goals: increasing the amount of traffic coming to your website. That’s where keywords come in. By optimizing your website with the use of keywords, you’ll have to improve your search engine ranking, making it easier for more people to find you, thereby increasing your web traffic.
Deciding what keywords to use throughout your website—whether it’s in content, title tags, meta tags, or image descriptions—isn’t simple task. So how exactly do you go about choosing the right keywords? The following are a few tips that will help you to find the right keywords for your website:
Be specific—but realistic.
If your business sells basketball sneakers, then using the keyword “shoes” or “sports” is going to be way too broad. Google “shoes” and you’ll see that there are roughly 786 million results. The term “sports” brings up over 3 billion results. What are the odds that you’ll be found by a user search these terms? Not very good. A term such as “boys basketball shoes size 5Y” is much more effective since you’ll have a better chance at being found. Of course, you don’t want to become too specific either, since the more specific your keyword becomes, the smaller the odds are that a user does a search using that specific term.
Know your buyer personas.
One of the keys to creating good keywords is by putting yourself in the shoes of your target audience. What kind of phrases would they use when searching for products and services relevant to your brand? Would they be happy about the content you have provided if they clicked on the link attached to your keywords? Would it satisfy their search query? These are important questions to ask and they are going to be much easier to answer if you have an understanding of who your target audience is, which is why you need a fully formed buyer persona. The buyer persona is a fictional character put together using data from your average customer, including average age, gender, income level, goals, worries and more.
Try out the keywords in search engines.
Do searches on Google using the keywords you have created in order to see what kind of results come up. This allows you to see who the competition is, thereby giving you a better understanding of how difficult it will be to rank highly using that keyword. Broader keywords tend to bring up huge businesses, which reduces the chance of being able to compete for a high search ranking. For example, if you sell used books online and you do a search for “books” you’ll see that Amazon is the first website that comes up, which means that “books” is probably not a good keyword to use since it won’t be very effective. Doing Google searches allows you to see how many search ads are being run at the top and to the right of the page. The more search ads you see, the more high value the keyword most likely is.
Use PPC ads
A pay per click ad, such as Google Ads, will let you create an ad that comes up when your keyword is searched for. You only pay for the amount of clicks that the ad obtains. You can compare the different ads you’ve run to see how many click-throughs certain keywords receive. The more clicks you get, the more effective that particular keyword might be.
Use Google’s Wonder Wheel
The Wonder Wheel is a filter option on Google’s search page. When you choose this, Google will provide you with a visual representation of how they group keywords together. So if you search “children’s basketball shoes,” you’ll be provided with other possibilities, such as “children’s basketball shoe comparisons” or “children’s basketball shoe reviews” that can give you ideas for your keywords.
Keywords are among the most powerful tools you have at your disposal when it comes to your website. If you choose keywords that isn’t relevant to your business, you aren’t going to get high quality traffic, which makes any increase in web traffic your website receives pretty much useless.
