You’ll know by now that organic SEO can make a real difference to your business as a whole. However, where many businesses owners and digital marketers are still going wrong boils down to their keyword choice. If you aren’t choosing the right keywords or keyphrases, then all your efforts may well go straight down the drain. You need to make sure that you are working alongside a professional SEO agency that understands how to find the perfect keywords for your business, products and services.
Thanks to plug-ins and add-ons like Yoast SEO, finding keywords is easier than ever. However, it takes many years of industry experience to notice trends and developments to help you find the right keywords and keyphrases.
Picking the right keywords and phrases is absolutely essential to your digital marketing and search engine optimisation. First of all, you need to understand why SEO is so important.
Why Does SEO Matter?
Search engine optimisation is a long-term marketing strategy that works to improve your business’ visibility in search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. By creating content and undertaking technical optimisation which works to make your domain more attractive to search engine crawler algorithms, you can improve your position in search engine results pages.
Search engines work through user queries, and the results are provided based on relevancy and quality to the search terms. By targeting essential keywords within these queries, you can improve your website’s relevancy to these terms and make it more likely that your domain will appear on the first page of Google.
Why Is Search Engine Visibility So Valuable?
Whether you’re looking for sales or other kinds of conversion, organic SEO is still the most valuable way of obtaining clicks. Google’s algorithms are incredibly good at finding relevant content, especially to answer specific questions.
Your potential visitors rely on Google because they know it provides high-value results for their search queries. That’s why they are more likely to trust organic search results than PPC marketing and paid advertising. Although pay-per-click marketing can provide great results, there is still a general distrust of advertising when compared to organic relevancy.
90% of all clicks on the first page of Google go on organic results, with the remainder going on pay-per-click marketing. That becomes even more valuable when you consider that only 8.5% of all traffic makes it past the first page. That means an incredible 91.5% will only trust organic and PPC results on the first page of Google, before refining their search.
The actually breakdown of Google’s clicks by page is:
- First Page of Google – 91.5%
- Second Page of Google – 4.8%
- Third Page of Google – 1.1%
- Fourth Page of Google – 0.4%
Every page after the fourth only receives 0.2% of all traffic, and most get much, much less.
That means that, even if you do appear on the second page organically, you will still only be receiving a share of the 4.8% of traffic which clicks onto the second page. Even then, the first three spots in the search engine results pages tend to attract a huge percentage of all clicks, meaning that you’re likely to gain a tiny fraction of that 4.8% if you aren’t at the top of the second page.
Finding The Perfect Keywords – Why Does It Matter?
Targeting the wrong keywords is one of the worst mistakes that you can make in a business. Not only can this result in a lot of wasted effort, but it can target an audience which isn’t the right one for your business. In turn, that can lead to a range of other problems relating to high clicks and a click-through-rate (CTR) but low conversions and sales. This can be a huge problem in PPC marketing (as it can quickly eat through your advertising budget), but it can be a negative for search engine optimisation as well.
Here’s the thing; it’s extremely easy to choose the wrong keywords. If you know your industry inside out, then you’ll immediately make assumptions based on what you would search to look for your products or services. They can often be far too specific, far too generalised, or just not the common phrase used by customers.
If you choose the wrong keywords, you might be able to optimise for them and follow all the best practices and SEO techniques. However, you’ll be fighting to rank for a keyword which doesn’t offer any real rewards to your business.
Selecting the right keywords, in the end, all comes down to understanding your target audience. For modern digital marketing, that doesn’t just mean knowing what they want, but understanding how their search habits work as well. You need to make sure that your domain is optimised for keywords that will bring qualified and relevant traffic to your website. You can’t just aim for clicks with your organic SEO efforts – you need to make sure that all your efforts results in conversions (including contact requests, phone calls, store visits) and eCommerce sales.
3 Tips On Picking The Right Keywords For Your Brand, Business And Domain!
Your keywords are likely to dictate your website’s success online, and you cannot afford to target the wrong terms. As well as working alongside a professional SEO agency, there are plenty of ways you can perform keyword research. When done properly, your keyword research can also help you to come up with ideas for your content marketing strategy.
1. Think Like Your Customer – When creating a basic keyword list, you should start of by thinking like your customer. It might not be the most specific way of finding the perfect keywords, but it’s a good place to start. After all, the end goal of your marketing campaigns is to make sure that you appeal to your customers in order to gain clicks, sales and conversions.
What’s more, by taking the time to think like your customer, you can really test your understanding of your target audience. You never know, you might discover something that you can use in your future digital marketing and social media efforts.
2. Use Keyword Research Tools – There are plenty of keyword and keyphrase research tools available to help you find your target terms. There is a mixture of both paid and free keyword research tools which can really help to fine-tune and cut down your initial list of potential keywords.
- Google Keyword Planner – Google’s AdWords tool, ‘Keyword Planner’ is a great place to start. You need to set up an AdWords account to use this keyword planner, but you don’t actually need to start a PPC marketing campaign.
When you input one keyword, multiple keywords or even something as simple as your domain name into the Keyword Planner, Google will give you a list of related keywords.
You’ll even be able to see some simple metrics to understand the competition around each keyword and how many searches it gets at both a global and local level. This planner will also provide information on historical stats, so you can see how the keyphrase has gained and lost popularity over the last few months and years. - Google Trends – Another free tool from the ever-generous Google. Google Trends will allow you to enter multiple keywords and keyphrases before filtering them by a range of different metrics, including location, search history and category.
The Google Trends tool will show you how much interest there is in a particular keyword as well as what caused the interest. It can not only show you where traffic is coming from, but it can even provide a range of related keywords and terms.
Google Trends is an extremely intelligent tool as it groups misspelled terms together with correctly spelled ones, as well as hiding repeated searches from a single user. Google Trends provide clean and reliable results for the popularity of keywords and phrases. - Keyword Tool.io – Now, Keyword Tool.io might be an extremely simple and rudimentary tool, but it works on a good premise. If you’re looking for long-tail keywords (more on those in a second), then this tool is a great idea. What’s more; it’s totally free!
Keyword Tool.io uses Google Autocomplete to generate an accurate list of relevant long-tail keywords. These can not only be extremely useful when targeting a specific type of searcher, but can really help with all kinds of content marketing and creation further down the line. This type of suggestion tool might not be a great tool when creating your initial list, but it can be essential when creating blogs which will do extremely well in Google, Yahoo or Bing, as well as appeal to customers in social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Medium.
3. Use Different Kinds Of Keyword – There are four main kinds of keyword which your search engine optimisation strategy needs to include. Although a good SEO agency will point you in the direction of long-tail, niche keywords, it can be a good idea to use a mixture in order to appeal to a wide range of searchers as well as more specific searchers.
The four types of keyword and keyphrase are:
- Long-Tail Keywords – Long-tail keywords are designed to target an extremely specific search query. These phrases are regular composed of three or four words, and are a great way to attract relevant traffic.
Although long-tail keywords will generally receive fewer searches than their shorter, simpler alternatives, they are much easier to rank for and are likely to attract a higher percentage of relevant searchers.
In the past, research has shown that more than 95% of all searchers are long-tail. They also regularly take the form of questions, and appealing to these specific questions is likely to attract clicks, conversions and eventual sales.
What’s more, these keywords can really help you to understand your customers’ intentions. A keyword like ‘coffee’, for example, wouldn’t tell you very much. However, the phrases ‘organic coffee beans’ and ‘best coffee shops’ offer plenty of information about the kind of searcher and what content they are looking for. - Local Keywords – When it comes to local SEO, local keywords are absolutely essential. These keywords are designed to users in a specific geographical area. Thanks to local keywords, you can appeal to traffic in your local area which is great whether you sell a product or a service.
- Body Keywords – Body keywords are regularly composed of two words which will offer some information on the customer’s intent, but not too much. They are possible to rank for, but it can take a long time and you’ll never be able to enjoy as high a conversion rate as you will from long-tail.
Body keywords still have their use, however. They can be used to create content for sharing on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Medium, for example. - Head Keywords – Head keywords are usually of one word and are practically impossible to rank for unless it’s a brand name. This could be something as simple and generic as ‘coffee’. Only target head keywords if it is part of your brand identity, but even then they are rarely worth creating content for.
A Quick Note On Semantic Keywords
Semantic searching is becoming an essential part of search engine optimisation, as your SEO agency will tell you. Also known as LSI, the secret to finding the best keywords involves using associated and semantic terms as well as your keyword.
LSI works because search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing are extremely, extremely intelligent. Going back to the coffee example for a moment, if a page talks about coffee then the search engine’s crawler algorithms are probably going to expect (or reward) mentions of:
- Coffee Beans.
- Milk.
- Lattes.
- Mochas.
- Hot Drinks.
- Caffeine.
- Coffee Grinder.
- Coffee Shops.
By filling your content with semantic keywords instead of just spamming the same keyword, you can improve the page’s relevance to the search query. You can also work to reassure that the search engine that your domain knows what it’s talking about.
For The Right Keywords, Choose An Experienced SEO Agency – Choose SEO Junkies
Here at SEO Junkies, we are an experienced SEO agency which specialises in creating high-value search engine optimisation campaigns to improve your domain’s rankings in search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. As well as professional SEO content marketing, we can offer a range of supportive services to create a more comprehensive marketing solution for your business.
Whether you’re looking for search engine optimisation, social media marketing,pay-per-click (PPC) marketing,conversion rate optimisation (CRO) or professional copywriting services get in touch with the experienced team at SEO Junkies today. You can reach our team directly on 0118 380 0203 or email any questions you might have to sales@seojunkies.com and we’ll get back in touch as soon as we can.