Keywords are the go-to building tool of websites that want to get their names high on Google rankings. Your keywords need to be popular, concise, and used in good context. We covered content in an earlier article, “Creating Search Engine Friendly Content: Contriving Creative & Concise Pages & Articles.”
So what are keywords? Keywords are the first step in search engine optimization. They’re terms that people search for. If you’re looking to find a contractor to do a job, you would go to Google and type in “reviews car repair orange county” or something similar. Google will first check for those key words in a website. First, they check the area – Orange County. Then they use car repair and reviews to narrow down the search. Search engines use a lot of different rules to determine the ‘best’ result to show, and many aren’t linked to keywords, but the first steps are all about what people search for. You want your keywords to fit what you’re selling and be relevant all across your website.
How do you know what keywords to choose?
There are several tools that can help you! Your keywords can be anything, but you don’t want anything- You want something precise that applies to your business in particular and gets your site highly ranked on Google and other search engines. Some popular tools are:
How do we use these tools?
1. Google Keyword Planneris the first step. It’s quick and it’s easy. All you have to do is pick one word that describes your business and hit ‘Get Ideas’, it should give you a whole list of relevant and related keywords. The important ones are related to copywriting. Check how relevant and popular the words you like are- you want ones that people search for often! Select a longer one and search it for what are called “Long-tail” variations, or strings of keywords. Rather than “Car repair”, you can get “Orange County Car Repair Specialists”
Avoid keyword stuffing! Don’t make your site about the exact same keyword either. Spread them out, make them occur naturally and organically.
2. Try 7search. Put in that same keyword you started with Google, and run it. Search in the same way. It doesn’t hurt to have too many options, you can always cut it down later. These give you an idea of what’s popular, relevant, and what might get you hits. Both of them can let you build a long-tail keyword list. Don’t forget to keep some short keywords to sprinkle through your site text, titles, and content. Make a list of your keywords that you want to use, and their popularity. It’s a delicate balance, trying to hit as many good, quality keywords as you can without your content looking like it was made up of nothing but excuses for those keywords.
3. Try out Buzzsumo. Tell the tool the keyword you want to use for a headline, title or otherwise. It will return with the highest-shared titles shared across different social media, which you can then use to find inspiration for your own titles. Other keyword tools are Ubersuggest, which will give you a lot of key phrases and headlines. Writer’s block is no match for this tool since it can give you a lot of material to work with from other various suggestion sites. Keywordtool.io is a second free tool that will give you up to 750 long-tail keyword variations of your original idea.
If this seems like a lot of work and effort, we’d be glad to help! We offer keyword and competition analysis that can help get you all the right keywords to get ranked higher. The higher you’re ranked, the more likely you are to get clicks and customers seeing your website. Contact Cal Coast Web Design today to get started!
