What are key words & how to use them: SEO Made Simple
Full disclosure, SEO isn’t a simple topic, it’s vast, analytical and continuously evolving. So, what can we do without a budget of thousands or a SEO Masters degree to get found on google.
A fair amount it turns out. I generate a lot of traffic (and enquiries) from my website via google search, and I don’t pay for any of it! My secret… keywords.
I’m here to help to simplify and show you some high return strategies that you can implement yourself without spending weeks, or lots of cash.
The first thing we need to do is to work out what key words we want to rank for (if that sentence doesn’t make any sense whatsoever to you… panic not. I’m going to explain).
What are Keywords for SEO?
Keywords are words that someone puts into a search engine which then pop out a list of search results
(Key words can be one word, but are often a short sentence or phrase).
Longer sentences/ phrases are known as “long tail keywords” and are usually less competitive but have fewer people searching for them as they’re more specific/niche. Short tail or head terms are more holistic and refer to a whole large area. They are usually fewer words and have many more people searching for them, but are much more competitive.
Example of a longtail key word:
Recipe for vegetarian spaghetti bolognese with mushrooms
Example of a short tail keyword or head term:
Italian recipe
What does it mean to rank for a key word?
Your ranking is where you come on the list of results that google (or any other search engine) shows when a key word is searched for. We want to come up as high on this list as possible (shock!).
Can you remember the last time you went to the fifth page of google? Of course you can’t because… it never happened. Ideally we want to rank as high up the first page of google as possible to improve our chances of people clicking on the link that takes them to our website. Research on user behaviour shows that the number 1 search result on google gets over 40% of the clicks - ideally we want to be there !
Note - here I’d like to introduce a couple of technical terms so you can feel very confident in deciphering other articles on SEO in the future !
SERP = Search Engine Results Page
This means the page that pops out the list of search results. You want to rank highly in the SERPs!
Impression
The number of times a page comes up in search results (regardless of where - it could be number 60 in the list for example)
CTR = Click through Rate.
The percentage of times that it comes up (has a search impression) that a result is clicked on.
Loving the SEO vibes? Check out more of my blogs to start getting website traffic from google
How do I choose key words for my website?
I see this process as a circle as opposed to a linear process. And once again it starts with our friend the ideal client.
How to choose your SEO key words
Step 1 - Define your ideal client (or customer)
Get an amazing, super detailed and clear description of your ideal client. You might find you have a couple of ideal clients – that’s OK, you can do this process for each/ all of them and note the cross over areas.
Pro tip: Try to keep this simple and don’t create more than 2 or 3 ideal clients - remember if you’re speaking to everyone you’re speaking to no-one.
Need some help defining your ideal client?
Step 2 - Understand the challenges your ideal client faces
List your ideal client’s pain and pleasure points. The key here is to identify what their biggest problems are, what makes their life difficult or uncomfortable, or from the opposite angle – what their greatest dreams and aspirations are – what things in life make them really super happy. Group these into buckets. We will use these to develop our key words.
Pro tip: Clearly the pleasure/ pain points should have some connection to your business. It’s a bit difficult to link selling carpet cleaner to someone’s pain point being that it’s taking way too long to DIY their website! Although for both of these people the time saving aspect of having a professional do it for them could be a solution to the “no time” problem.
Step 3 - Develop SEO keyword themes
Look at each “bucket” and write a list of what they would type into google to help them solve their problem, or indeed find their “happy”. Think about all of the different permutations of these google searches. It can be helpful to think of synonyms, questions they might ask in a search and more/ less specific searches. By doing this you are creating a list of key words.
You can also put these keywords into google and check out the related searches that come up.
The Ubersuggest chrome plug in gives useful data here too (you can also get all of this on their website without installing the plug in if you prefer).
Heard that a great place to use SEO keywords is in your blogs? You’d be right…
Step 4 - Theme or group your SEO keywords
Group these under each “bucket” and split into long tail, and short tail key words for each (ideally we want a balance of long and short tail key words for each bucket).
Step 5 - Review your competitors key words
Now it’s time to check out your competitors. There are two great ways to do this:
1. Use your search terms and see who else comes up. See what else they rank for by using Ubersuggest’s great free tool.
2. If you have a good idea of your competitors skip your search terms and go straight into looking at your competitors on Ubersuggest. Make a list of their top keywords (also look for keywords that they don’t do so well on – these could be useful for you to target first).
Top tip – it’s common that we look straight away at our most well-known competitors, this can be a mistake as we miss the opportunity for quick wins with our less well known/ smaller competitors who might be ranking for more niche long tail keywords. Think also a little more out of the box here and look across the full range of those operating in the same space as you.
Step 6 - refine and improve your list of keywords
Now you have these key words – add them to your buckets. And it’s time to start refining...
Ubersuggest can help us here too, by telling us some key info about each key word which will help us to understand how to prioritise them.
How many people are searching with that key word. This one is quite easy to interpret – the more the better!
How competitive the key word is. Now this is where it gets more tricky, because although there may be millions of people searching for a certain keyword, it may also be super competitive to “rank for” and if this is the case then you might find that it’s very difficult or takes a very long time to rank for that key word.
A good proxy for competitiveness is the CPC (which stands for cost per click) – or the price that organisations who have paid ads have to pay to google when someone clicks on their link. The higher this cost, usually the more competitive the key word. Ubersuggest also offers a competitiveness rating for both paid and SEO organic searches to help you figure out how competitive a key word is.
The sweet spot here is key words that are not too competitive yet have a large enough volume of people searching them to make using them worthwhile.
You may decide to pick some more challenging key words to work on over a longer period of time, and some key words that are less competitive to be quick wins. A mixture of both of these is good (and also will often naturally be a mixture of short and long tail key words).
Once again, reduce down and prioritise your key words – some might be for your home page/ about page and other core website pages. Others may be more for blog or product pages. You’re looking to have 1 or 2 per page (if using 2 the second should be a slight variation of the first).
And now is the point at which to go back to your ideal client.
Test your key words against them, their needs, their challenges and the questions they’re asking in their searches. Ask yourself which are they most likely to use in their searches – prioritise these. Which have maybe gone a bit off track – strike these off.
Consider search intent here (what do they mean by the search) are they looking for information or for a service or to buy something? Remember you want people coming to your website who want what you’re offering (otherwise you’re wasting your time and theirs!)
Finalise your list of key words in priority order and you’re ready to rock and roll.
Now is the time to start writing your content - using your key words of course! Need some help? Check out my step by step guide to writing website copy that gets you found on google.
As I said at the beginning, there is masses more to learn about SEO keyword research, but you can get a pretty strong start by following the above (nearly 50% of small business owners don’t even know what SEO is – you’re already well ahead of that section of the field!).
If you want to geek out more – I love the following sites for resources and information to take your SEO game up a notch.
Not so much of a DIYer and want someone to Do it for you?
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