Having a keyword strategy is essential to SEO. If you don’t include the right keywords on your website, it will be hard for people to find you when searching on Google. But keywords don’t just help with people being able to find you, they help your business to rank better on Google.
What are keywords?
Keywords are phrases that people type into search engines like Google when they are searching for something online. For example, “car repair places near me” or “car repair places in Fourways”. Each phrase is known as a keyword. If you own a car repair place and want your website to reach the top of the search engine results page (SERP), then having a keyword strategy is helpful.
Why is a keyword strategy important?
If you have ever wanted to make a planned purchase and had questions, you would have likely researched it first, right? It’s the same for the majority of us. In fact, 81% of shoppers research their product online before purchasing according to Transaction Agency who conducted a shopper research study in 2019.
Consumers often search for reviews and recommendations online before making a purchase as these often give helpful insights into what the product is really like. If your website ranks highly in search engines, it can reach people who have done their research and are ready to buy. If you have an excellent keyword strategy, your website should reach those who are not even yet looking to buy.
Advertising through organic search is a great way to reach people globally, provided that your website ranks high on SERPs. This is important because, let’s be honest, not many searchers look beyond the first page of Google. According to Sistrix, the average click-through rate for the first position on Google is 28.5%. While the second position only has a click-through rate of 15.7%.
Choose the right keywords for your website
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Analyse your website
Have a look at all the pages currently on your website. Make sure that you have included relevant keywords that speak to your business on the most important pages. If you have a large site, use a spreadsheet to help keep track of all your pages and subsequent keyword improvements. If you have a blog, make use of keyword research tools to help give you ideas for new blog topics. If you have old blogs, go back and edit them, using relevant keywords to optimize them.
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Find a keyword research tool
A keyword research tool will provide you with useful data and help you to choose the best keywords for your business website. Some of the best keyword research tools include:
- Soovle
- Jaxxy
- Google Search Console
- Ahrefs Keyword Explorer
- SeCockpit
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Keyword research
Think of keywords that relate to your product or service and topics that you want to rank for on Google as your target audience will probably be doing searches for those specific terms. Come up with about 5-10 topics that you feel are important to your business. Look at their monthly search volume using the keyword research tool to see just how important these keywords are to your audience. This will give you a rough set of phrases that you think potential clients or customers might use to search for your product or service. Eventually, your list will be narrowed down to identify more accurate keywords.
Another way to come up with keywords is to figure out which keywords your website is already getting found for. To do this, you can use a tool like Google Analytics. Google analytics drills down into your website’s traffic sources and sifts through your organic search segment in order to identify the keywords that searchers are typing in to arrive at your site.
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Look at the metrics
Analyse the data that the keyword research tool spits out for your specific keyword. Pay attention to a few things such as search volume (the number of searches per month for a particular keyword) and SEO difficulty and paid difficulty. Lower scores are an indication that the keyword is easier to rank for while higher ones mean that it’s more difficult.
Look at CPC or cost-per-click (the amount that you pay Google per click to your website) if you decide to run an ad in Google search. Keywords that have a higher cost-per-click are usually more valuable.
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Choose your keywords
After analysing the keywords, you will have a better idea of whether a certain keyword is worth using or not. It’s best to use keywords with high search volume, low SEO difficulty and paid difficulty and low volume (competition has low domain scores and few backlinks).
