It’s always a good plan to go in with a strategy or at least some ideas. Knowing how to optimize keywords is a great way to help your company improve its search engine rankings.
Here are the five tips I find most practical when approaching keywords.
1. You have to understand what a keyword is before you start your SEO journey.
A keyword is a word or phrase for a real-world problem that users need to solve. Users have immediate problems to solve when they go to a search engine and by doing proper keyword research, marketers have an opportunity to identify those problems and put themselves in front of them to present a solution.
2. Foundational questions to ask yourself when performing keyword research:
- What keywords do you want to rank for?
- What terms do you already rank for?
- You can use this information to find potential relevant keywords that also have a high volume of searches per month.
3. The initial steps to your keyword research are important.
You have to:
- Identify your seed keywords: these are the words that will grow your keyword list. You can find these by doing proper keyword research in a tool like Moz.
- Prioritize keywords by potential. Because you will sometimes generate hundreds of thousands of keywords, you have to prioritize the words you want to rank for and decide which are most important to you and/or your product.
Understand on-page optimization: According to Moz, “It’s important that visitors to your site can do two things right away: know what the page they land on is about and easily find the information they’re looking for. These indicate to search engines that your page is meeting customer needs, which in turn boosts your ability to rank higher and drive more traffic” (source here). To achieve this, it is crucial that you group keywords by relevance to improve rankings and user experience.
4. Your biggest mistake is NOT doing keyword research.
There are thousands of keywords you can use to target your content. But to succeed in your keyword strategy, use the keywords that have sufficient search volume, are relevant to solutions you offer, and lastly avoid low-relevancy terms.
5. Research your competitors’ SERP rankings.
Your competitors compete for many of the same keywords as you do, and can be ranked by visibility and other metrics. By looking at your competitors’ websites and products, you can see what they rank for and consider terms you may have overlooked.
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