If you’ve done any search engine optimization work, you are no doubt familiar with the concept of “keywords” as a foundational factor of SEO. But many people find the process of creating a keyword strategy and performing keyword research to be confusing and overwhelming. This article will cover the basics of keywords in SEO and how to create an effective strategy so you can reach your desired audience.
What Are Keywords?
This seemingly innocuous question is actually more complex than it used to be. So we’ll get into some of the nuances of this question. At its most basic, keywords are the words and phrases that are most relevant to your website. And, ideally, when someone uses those words and phrases in a search, your website will appear at the top of search results. But in order for that to happen, it’s important to fully understand how to identify the right keywords for your site.
Topics Are Not Keywords
One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they are trying to identify their own keyword universe is they will go too broad with their choices and target topics rather than keywords. So, what’s the distinction? A topic is the general category under which your website might fall. Keywords are specific words and phrases within that topic that identify your niche. For instance, let’s say you make handmade wooden tables. A topic might be something like “furniture” or even a bit narrower with “wood furniture.” But some keywords would be “handmade wooden furniture,” “handmade wooden tables,” “handmade dining room tables,” etc.
The trap that people commonly fall into is the lure of search volume. They may see that “furniture” gets anywhere from 300k to 1.5 million searches per month. “Wood furniture,” on the other hand, only gets about 3-4k searches per month. So people will get enamored with the idea of maybe just getting a fraction of those 1.5 million searches. Because maybe they’re not first in search results. But what if they’re 20th? When it comes to search rankings, if you’re not on the first page, you essentially don’t exist. Backlinko conducted a study of over 4 million search results and found that only 0.63% of users clicked on something on the 2nd page (positions 11-20).
So, it’s of no use to you to pursue broad, high volume search terms. Your odds of ranking on the first page are very slim and, if you do, who’s to say that your site is even relevant to the search being performed? And this brings us to two main strategies – long-tail keywords and user intent. We cover each of these next.
Long-tail keywords
Long-tail keywords are where your bread gets buttered. They’re not going to blow anyone’s mind in terms of search volume. But they are going to be responsible for bringing in the majority of your traffic, so it’s important to understand what they are and how to utilize them.
What are long-tail keywords?
Long-tail keywords are search terms that are specific and consist of three words or more. Using the example above, “tables” or “furniture” would be a short-tail keyword. “Handmade wood dining tables” would be a long-tail keyword. They only get a tiny fraction of the search volume of their short-tail brethren. But what they lack in volume, they make up for in clicks. Because you know that if you make handmade wood dining tables, and someone is searching for exactly that, you are going to be a pretty good match. Your odds of landing a customer searching for this sort of thing is extremely high. Far higher than someone just searching for “tables.”
Committing to a long-tail keyword strategy does not mean that you don’t need to have a keyword strategy and that you just hope that people search for terms that are already on your website. It is still essential to do your keyword research so you know what your potential customers are looking for when they conduct a search. Because maybe the language on your website references “handmade wood tables” (which gets about 100-200 searches/month), but there are far more people searching for “custom wood tables” (500-850). You’ll want this information so you can adjust your site accordingly.
User Intent
User intent is a crucial aspect of any effective keyword strategy. What it means is that you need to consider what a user is actually looking for when they are typing their query into a search engine. If you’re using a free tool like Google’s Keyword Planner, or a paid one like SEMRush, aHrefs, or Moz Keyword Explorer, you’ll find that they all give you an extensive list of keywords related to whatever word or phrase you’re plugging in. But you can’t just rely on search volume or “keyword difficulty” when going through those lists. You must factor in user intent with any of these search terms, and whether they align with your website’s content.
Using our “wood tables” example, these are the top 10 keywords by search volume that are related to the search term of “wood tables.”
Some of these terms have a high search volume, but someone searching for “world market” is not likely to be in the market for a custom, handmade wooden table. “Furniture” is a bit better, but someone searching for “furniture” is probably looking for a furniture store near their location. Even “table” is too broad to be of much value. In summary, just because a word is related your keyword does not mean it’s related to your business. So, be sure you’re considering user intent in your keyword research.
How To Find The Right Keywords
Now that we’ve got some of the basics established, here are some steps you can follow to identify the best keywords for your website.
1. Identify your customers/visitors
Before you are even thinking about keywords or website content, you will want to understand your audience. Who is going to be interested in your product or service? Many recommend creating a “buyer persona” so that you can have a clear picture of who your customer is, what they want, what information they need, etc. This will help inform your content strategy and potentially your product development strategy too.
2. Create the buyer journey
Now that you’ve got a clear sense of who your potential customer is, try to put yourself in their head and imagine what their motivations and needs are. When you do this exercise, bear in mind that people frequently start their buying process (and this applies to products or services) long before they are actively seeking out a specific product or service. Especially for bigger ticket items or higher-priced services, the buying process is going to be much longer. So you want to start building a relationship with them from the beginning, so that when they’re ready to actually make a purchase, they’ll think of you first.
When someone ultimately seeks you (or one of your competitors) out, what led them to that point? What research might they do before they are even at the point where they’re actively shopping? Step through the entire path of your customer’s process from beginning to end. (Hubspot has a great article on the buyer’s journey and each of its stages).
3. Map out your content strategy
You now have your customer defined and a clear picture of their buyer journey. With this information, you are armed with everything you need to define a content strategy that will put you on a path to becoming a topic authority. You might be wondering why we’re talking about being a topic authority when we described above that topics are not keywords.
To clarify, when you write a piece of content (article, blog, etc.), your focus of that piece will center around the long-tail keyword. And there are going to be several long-tail keywords that you will pursue that are under the larger umbrella of that topic. Eventually, as you build up a library of articles covering all of these sub-topics/long-tail keywords, you will have begun to establish yourself as an authority on the broader topic.
As you look at your buyer journey, consider every step of that process and what questions they might be asking along the way. Or maybe there are questions that your potential customers don’t normally know to ask. All of these questions lay the foundation for your content strategy. When you write content (articles/blogs/FAQs) to address these questions, you establish yourself as an authority on the subject matter and build trust with your site visitors.
Tip: If you’re struggling to come up with questions on your own, do a Google search on the subject you’re considering and make note of the questions in the “People also ask” portion of the search results.
4. Build your keyword universe
You’ve traced the buyer journey and mapped out your content strategy to answer every question that comes up along that path. Each of these questions will be one of your keywords/phrases. Maybe it’s not the full question, but some portion of it. List out every one of these. Additionally, if there are other words or phrases that are relevant to your business, add them to your list. Just remember to be specific (long-tail). At this stage you don’t need to think of every word and its synonyms that are related to your business. You just want a list of the questions that come up during the buyer journey and the words/phrases that are very closely related to what your business. The keyword research part of the process will nail down the specific words.
5. Find your keyword sweet spot
There are a number of ways to conduct keyword research – some free and many are paid. Up in the User Intent portion of this article, we mentioned Google Keyword Planner, Semrush, aHrefs, and Moz. Google is the only free one of this bunch and worth checking out. But if your budget allows it, springing for one of the other tools is well worth it. The keyword portion of these tools lets you plug in a word/phrase and they will return an extensive list of related words with their search volume and estimated difficulty to rank for a given word. Utilizing one or more of these tools is an essential part of an effective keyword research program.
For every keyword/phrase/question you’ve identified, plug that word into your tool of choice. Most of these tools will sort your results by relevance by default. That will make it easier to find the words that are most closely aligned with your original target keyword. And some of those may have better numbers (higher search volume, low keyword difficulty) than your original keyword. However, you can choose to sort by search volume instead. If you do this, you’ll get some results with a very high search volume, but they will likely have a high keyword difficulty or not be particularly relevant to your original keyword. Your goal will be to find that sweet spot: the keyword that is relevant, has a low keyword difficulty and as high of a volume that you can get. Remember, though, that you’re going after long-tail keywords here, so don’t expect search volume numbers to be large.
Unleash Your Content
You should now have your carefully cultivated and finely-tuned list of keywords. With that in hand, your content roadmap is laid out for you. Be aware that the content part of the equation is where the rubber meets the road. While some have claimed that SEO is dead, the truth is that old SEO is dead. Gone are the days that you can just tweak a page with your target keywords and expect to start ranking in search results. The keywords will tell you what people are looking for, but if your content isn’t up to snuff, you’re unlikely to see much of a rise in your Google results. So just bear in mind that keywords are just a small (but important) part of the overall SEO equation.
If you have questions about developing a keyword strategy for your website, contact us today. Consultations are free and we’re always happy to help.
