How Rethinking Your Keywords Can Boost Your SEO

SEO can be a bit daunting. There are tags, headers, format, images, your image tags, your page descriptions…But let’s put all that to the side for a minute and narrow our focus. Let’s share a few words about your website’s keywords.

So, your keywords. You’ve come up with them. You’ve applied them to your website, and your search results aren’t seeing any sort of marked improvement. What did you do wrong? It could be as simple as poor optimization on your end. Let’s look at a few ways to help improve this and get you the search results you’re after.

Understand how your keywords are leading to conversions.

Knowing your buyer’s journey can be a strong starting point in beginning to optimize your keywords. Look at where they ended up purchasing something from your business and what keyword may have led them there. An analysis like this allows you to determine which keywords may be working and successful at initiating this transaction and which words may be lacking when it comes to this. Which of your phrases has a customer gone after? Which phrases have driven them to a competitor? Identify which is which and rectify accordingly.

Consider the Competition:

Speaking of the competition, having a quick peek at what they may be doing differently than you can also be a helpful tool for optimizing your keywords. To be clear, this isn’t saying that you should construct your keywords around outright copying them and attempting to direct their traffic to you, only that it can be a useful tool for self-examination. If they’re using ones that you missed, consider adopting a few of those. Are there ones that they aren’t using, but you are? Refer to tip one and see if there’s a reason they aren’t. If there are ones they are not using, don’t use those either. There’s probably a reason they aren’t, and why hamper yourself? What strategies are effective for them, and could these be effective for you?

Services

Admittedly, rooting through all these small details can be a bit exhausting. Similarities start to blur, differences become harder to identify, small details in phrasing can become unclear, and it can be easy to “lose the plot” of why you started trying to solve these issues in the first place. As such, here’s one free and one paid platform that can help with this:

Google Keywords Planner: Keywords Planner is a free service that, while lacking some of the features that paying for AdWords may show, nonetheless is very useful, allowing you to search by keywords, and find metrics for them like average monthly searches, the bids for the top of page ads, and competition. You can also seed by keyword AND by URLs.

SEMrush: SEMrush is a paid SEO keyword research suite that offers its “keyword magic” tool as its strong selling point. You can identify long-tail keywords, receive nearly 2,000,000 suggestions, and find semantically related keyword groupings. It analyzes competition for specific words and phrase matches, provides related keywords, and even common misspellings that can help to catch related phrases.

Hopefully, this helps you get started with improving and enhancing your keywords. And if you need even more assistance, feel free to get in touch. Our SEO wizards are more than happy to help!