3 Tips for Choosing the Right Keywords to Boost SEO
Search Engine Optimization (aka. SEO) is the term we use to describe how a website performs within search engine results. Obviously, the more “optimized” a website is, the more prominently it displays when a person using a search engine searches using relevant keywords.
Every website has their eyes on the same prize: the much-coveted number one position. You want to be the first website displayed by a search engine for every relevant search your target audience makes. Every small business owner, marketer, blogger, author, etc. can agree — if you aren’t #1 (or somewhere very, very close to #1) your website is about as relevant as a Nokia phone in 2023. No one will know you even exist.
So, to ensure that your website is optimized for search engines in reaching your audience, you have to be sure to use the right keywords. Keywords are to SEO like peanut butter is to a PB&J sandwich or like cheese whiz is to a Philly steak. You can’t have one without the other. But usually the problem of boosting SEO for a website isn’t a problem of keywords for all searches; it’s knowing the right keywords to use in order to be optimized for the right searches. Choosing the right keywords as the foundation of your website will have you skyrocketing toward the top position with time. Using the wrong keywords or not having a keyword strategy for SEO will have you praying that the scrolly wheel on your potential customer’s mouse gets stuck and they just-so-happen to come across your website buried deep in the search results. And so, to help you all with choosing the right keywords for your website, here are three tips as you begin, or continue on, your SEO journey.
1. Know your audience
This feels so elementary, but it is so important. If you don’t know what keyword searches your customer (your audience) would be using to find what you are offering on your site, then it doesn’t matter which tools and tips you follow from here on out. You won’t reach the people you want to reach. It is crucial to start here.
From my past experience, many SEO issues start with small businesses not truly knowing who they are selling to and who they are trying to reach. They have an idea in their head of who they would like to sell to, but they don’t truly know who they are selling to. Taking this one step further, small businesses also don’t take the time to do proper market research, perform user studies, build out client personas, or collect adequate VoC (Voice of Customer) to know how their audience uses technology. A small business owner with a good understanding of how their target audience relates to their website should be able to rattle off how confident in using technology their audience is, what devices they prefer to use, how they begin searching for services or products similar companies provide, and so on.
My advice? If you are a small business owner, you should have multiple target client personas built, with the goal of understanding how your client thinks, acts, and uses technology. If you don’t have this nailed down, I highly recommend starting here by building out robust client personas. You cannot truly determine the correct keywords for your website until you have taken this crucial step.
2. Brainstorm relevant keywords
It all starts with brainstorming. The right keywords for your website do not simply appear out of thin air. Building off of understanding your audience, think of what search terms and descriptive words your potential customer will use to find a product like yours. This takes dedicated time and effort. Schedule an hour and sit down with a pen and paper and write down all of the different keywords your audience will use. Start small with individual words and expand into short phrases until you have quite a long list to go off of.
Remember that keywords have to be relevant and — for lack of a better term — correct. You can choose the wrong keywords while trying to reach the right audience. For example, if you’re attempting to sell your small batch, locally brewed sodas in the Midwest United States, you better not use the keyword “soda” when you build the content for your website. Your target audience — those who drink locally brewed specialty sodas in the Midwest — will likely naturally search for your product using “pop” as a keyword. (Listen, I don’t understand why people from Pittsburgh to North Dakota can’t get it together when naming carbonated beverages either. But here’s a map showing survey results of what regions use different terms for soda, if you’re curious.) Center your website around the keywords that your audience will instinctively use to find your products and services.
Also, it is important to remind my e-commerce friends that sometimes descriptions of your products don’t make good keywords either, because your clients might not be using those product descriptors to find what you are selling. If you sell budget-friendly furniture, you probably shouldn’t build your site around “pine furniture.” Instead, think about what words your client would actually be typing into the search engine to find you. Something like “cheap tables for college dorm room” or “apartment coat trees under $50” might be what your customers would be using to try to find your product. I’m not necessarily advocating that “$50” would be a keyword to build your site on, but you should use the keywords with which your potential customers will search.
3. Choose the top keywords and convert them to long-tail keywords
By now, you likely have a very long list of one-keyword and multi-keyword search terms and must decide on which to use for your website. Here is how this relates to SEO — you need to tell search engine “crawlers” that review website content what your website is about. You do this with keywords, whether or not it’s with the keywords you intend to use. These crawlers determine what your website is about by how often you use certain words and what combination of words are used together. This applies to your website overall, pages with product or services descriptions, and blog posts. All of these indexed (crawled and ranked) pages tell one coherent story, and you tell this story by orchestrating a keyword strategy. Narrow down your list of keywords until you have a few that would most frequently appear in client searches.
Now take this list and go one step further. It’s not enough to only choose one-word nouns and verbs to build your website content on to reach your audience. Remember that one-word and two-word search terms are likely being utilized by tens-of-thousands of websites worldwide, so you must add words to make your website more specific and niche. Want an example? If you provide a landscaping service in your area and you rely on “landscaping” as your main and only keyword for your entire website, you are going to have stiff competition for the term, even if you use it everywhere throughout your website. (Side note: I will talk about the dangers of “keyword stuffing” in a future post, but just know that you can over-use keywords.) Instead of using only one-word keywords throughout your website, think of ways you can add more keywords to differentiate your offer so that your website ranks higher for clients who may be looking for exactly what you offer. Is your landscaping budget-friendly? Can it be done same-day? Is it eco-friendly? What towns and neighborhoods do you offer your landscape services in? Once you chain a few keywords together, you start to narrow your scope of relevant searches while simultaneously increasing your pagerank for those searches. “Landscaping” turns into “same day landscaping in Malvern,” and now you can target those clients who are looking for a local landscaping service to mow their lawn as soon as possible. If your site is built on long-tail keywords like this, you can expect your website to be optimized for those more-targeted searches.
Conclusion: Keywords are the foundation of a small business website
Improving SEO for your website takes a good deal of effort and strategy. And this effort and strategy starts with building a website with smart keywords that will be relevant to what your audience will be searching. There is a lot more that goes into SEO, but identifying strong keywords for your website and integrating them into a keyword strategy can give your website a major boost in reaching your audience. If you need help getting started, or are looking for a business to take one less thing off your plate, send me a message so we can discuss what that looks like for your business. Strong keywords to improve SEO really are the foundation of a healthy website, so don’t wait to get started with the steps outlined above.
