What are keywords?
Imagine you need to buy a kitchen widget from Amzaon.com. So, you open the Amazon app on your mobile phone, type in “Kitchen Widget,” and initiate the search. It will bring up a variety of kitchen widgets in different size and colors, and you can select the one you like and buy it. The word “kitchen widget” that you typed in the search bar is a keyword.
Keyword research determines which words are typed in Google search bar the most, how many visitors type in those words in each month, and how many websites and businesses are targeting the exact same words.
Keywords are the building blocks of Google search engine optimization or SEO, and without keywords, there is no SEO. Keywords act as a guide, which help you identify the thoughts, needs, fears and motivations of your target audience and customers, tell you where to go! Before starting your keyword research, you should ask yourself these questions:
What sets apart my business from others and makes it unique?
What are the aim and mission of my business, and what are my core values?
What services and products am I offering to my customers?
What are my customers’ main problems, and how can I solve them?
Good keyword research will help you identify the best terminology to use in your website’s content. Then you can use these keywords and phrases in the most important locations of your site so that Google promotes your website to the higher pages on the search engine results page, which improves its visibility and visitors. By doing so, a potential customer who is searching for businesses similar to yours will find your website on the 1st page of Google, which puts you ahead of your competitors.
For instance, if you are running a compounding pharmacy in Omaha, ideally, you would like your business to appear on page 1 of Google when a potential customer types in “compounding pharmacy in Omaha.” You may use this keyword and its variations, such as “best compounding pharmacy in Omaha” or “Omaha compounding pharmacies,” to target potential customers in your local area who are looking for your services and products.
Visualizing your potential and ideal buyers is the first step in keywords selection. To do so, you need to pay attention to their interest, concerns, and demographics and think about the questions they might have when searching for your service or product.
There are several free or paid apps and software programs, which can help you identify your desired keywords. Google search box is one of those free tools!
Search volume shows the number of searches of each keyword or phrase on Google over one month. A decimal value shows the degree of competition for a keyword, which a value closer to 1 means higher competition for the keyword. In our keyword research strategy, we must look for keywords with higher traffics and lower competition.
Keywords everywhere is a paid tool that gives keyword suggestions and identifies competition and search volume for any phrase or word you type in.
In successful keyword research, you need to choose the keywords with high traffic (higher monthly visits) but not much competition. If you choose a short-tail keyword with tons of traffic, your website will likely be lost in the deluge of the other sites, which target the same keyword. On the other hand, if you choose along-tail and very specific keyword, you will diminish the traffic to your website. So, you need a keyword with medium search volume and competition, generally composed of 2 to 4 words.
In the past, some websites used to put their keywords everywhere on the page, including titles and paragraphs, also known as “keyword stuffing.” However, this is not a natural way of writing and can easily be detected by search engines, which ends up penalizing the website. The best way of using keywords is to put the primary keyword once in the page title and variations in headings and content. This natural way of writing significantly improves the targeted keywords’ ranking.
The goal of keyword research is to improve the traffic flow to your website and improve the customers’ conversion. Good keyword research strategically increases the number of visitors who search for specific services or products in your local area and most likely will become your future clients. Although there are tons of keyword research tools out there, lots of creative thought power and expertise are still needed to find effective keywords, resulting in profitable and productive marketing.
Working with experts who have experience in specialized tasks such as keyword research and SEO is smart. Our Omaha SEO experts have years of experience in creating effective keyword strategies, which helped many local, national, and global businesses to rank on the first page of Google. We can revolutionize your site to skyrocket customer conversion and traffic. Call Omaha SEO Agency at 402-686-3104.