One of the most important steps in a successful SEO campaign is selecting the right keywords to optimise your website for. In order to increase the amount of relevant traffic to your website, your website needs to be optimised with the keywords that potential customers will be searching for. Without proper optimisation, users searching for a completely different type of business may end up stumbling upon your website because your page titles and descriptions aren’t clear or optimised.
Keyword research can feel like an impossible task, especially if you don’t know where to start, so here are our top tips for choosing the right keywords for your SEO:
Know Your Customer
The best way to form a key list of keywords to start your research is to put yourself in your customers shoes. Imagine that you are a customer in the market for whatever service or product you offer, what would you search for? What exact phrases or questions would you type into Google with the hope of finding your business? Sit down with your team and create a list of these phrases, you will be able to use these to find similar phrases that actual customers are searching for in your research.
Analyse Your Competitors
Think about your closest competitors and look at their website, read the content and see if you can identify any keywords or phrases that they have optimised with and add them to your list. A good place to look would also be the titles and descriptions of their pages. Looking at your competitors will give you a good idea of what you’re doing right or wrong in comparison to their SEO, and give you inspiration for further terms.
Think Long Term
Business owners generally make the mistake of only focusing on one- or two-word keywords which often are very competitive and have high search volumes. Long tail keywords have lower search volumes but are far more specific, so often lead to more valuable traffic. Ensure your keyword list consists of a mixture of short and long tail keywords to ensure all bases are covered.
Research
There are many free tools that will help you discover new keyword opportunities as well as find out search volumes and other important information about your keywords, Google Keyword Planner is the best. Keyword Planner will also help you create potential ad groups for advertising campaigns.
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