If you have a business, you probably want people to find you, and you want the Internet to help. The good news is targeted keywords can do just that.
Think about how we find almost everything these days. Unless you’re a Luddite, it generally starts with a search bar and a quick brainstorm about what it is you’re looking for. While the use of search engines was once a relatively crude process of translating your wants and needs into a few key phrases, our search engine lexicon has become very intuitively developed. Let’s say you’re hungry. You wouldn’t just type “FOOD” into your search bar. You’re not a caveman, and Google doesn’t want to treat you like one.
Over time, search engines have advanced to handle search terms with greater elegance and sophistication. Just last fall Google rolled out its latest algorithm update, Hummingbird, which treats search queries with contextual relevance and a greater understanding of natural language processing, rather than treating each keyword as separate, clunky entities.
From a marketing perspective, if you want to be found by your customers via an online search engine, you have to reverse-engineer this process and think both like a search engine and like your customer.
Think Like Google
Search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, etc. are at their essence the concierge department for the Internet. They are designed to make sense of the ever-multiplying information that’s out there so that people can find what they’re looking for with the least amount of hassle. Across the board, search engines have been getting better and better about intuiting our needs and returning relevant, useful information based on the string of words we plop into a search bar.
With relevance and utility in mind, search engines don’t rank content according to how many times a keyword is used on a page. Remember, search engines ultimately want to be useful to actual humans, and people don’t want content with keywords sprinkled amongst an irrelevant narrative. They want quality content that’s relevant to the few key words they typed into a search box, and when they find that content, they share it. So the more your content gets shared and linked to other sites with good reputations, the more your content will be favored by the search engine algorithm. In other words, what’s considered good content to humans is interlinked with what’s considered good content to a search engine.
Keyword Brainstorm
Now, think about what you offer in your customer’s terms. Why do people need your product or service? What problems could they have that would send them looking for you? What do you have to offer? Brainstorm a list of keywords and phrases that come to mind that are relevant to your business purpose. The more relevant your keywords, the more likely you are to attract your target audience and ultimately draw them down the funnel. Here’s a checklist you should consider to help you fine tune your list of targeted keywords:
- Specificity. You may sell sandwiches, but get more specific to make sure your keywords are relevant to your customer. Keep in mind things like geographic keywords and vocabulary. Would your customer use industry jargon or laymans terms? Do you only offer services in the U.S.? Only in New York City? Only in your neighborhood? Any language restrictions? Your targeted keywords should reflect those restrictions.
- Search Volume. How often are people typing in your targeted keywords? More popular and generic keywords will have higher search volume, while excessively detailed search terms will drum up little response
- Competition. How many other sites are out there that are offering the same product/services and targeting the same keywords? How popular is this topic?
To find the audience you want, you need to find the ideal calibration between these three points. More generic search words are likely to generate a high volume of search results with lots of competition, leaving your site lost in the noise and unlikely to rise up the ranks of Google’s results pages. On the other hand, if your keywords are overly specific you probably won’t have much competition, but you’ll also have low search volume, so you won’t reach many people. Ideally, you’re looking to optimize your keywords so they are just specific enough to have lower competition without sacrificing volume, while still remaining relevant to the type of site visitors you are looking to attract.
That being said, this calibration process isn’t meant to be completed based on intuition. Since Google is the chief moderator of search results, they also developed the go-to tool for keyword brainstorming and assessment, the Google AdWords’s Keyword Planner. While you need an AdWords account to access it, the planner allows you to enter the keywords you brainstormed, see comparable keyword suggestions, and filter the suggestions based on search volume, competition (high, low, medium), and locality (local versus global).
Another helpful tool for targeted keyword analysis is Moz’s Keyword Difficulty and SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) Analysis Tool, which shows which keywords have the most competition based on the strength of the domains rounding out the top results. Moz Academy has also produced a fantastic, informative introduction video explaining how to use the Keyword Difficulty tool — if you’re new to the tool, or new to targeted keywords and SEO in general, it’s worth a watch.
SEO Is A Game That Is Never Won
Once you’ve found the ideal keywords that are perfectly relatable to you with high volume and low competition, congratulations! You’ve found keywords that should help you generate traffic, but there’s still no guarantee that your dream keywords will attract the type of visitors and leads you want. If you’ve optimized for keywords that aren’t driving the leads you’re looking for, then it’s time to recalibrate. There is always more competition coming up the pipeline as well, especially as trends change, so what were once low-competition keywords can become overgrown by search results in a heartbeat. Always keep an eye on your keywords and the lead results they’re generating, and whenever you need to recalibrate, jut go back to step 1 and repeat!