Let’s talk about what makes SEO (search engine optimization) profitable for businesses of any size.
If you don’t know yet, when you optimize the pages on your website correctly, search engines will serve up your page higher than any of your competitors if you give them one thing…
You must give them the right words for consideration.
Even with spoken technology, we use words to request information. If you want to know which restaurants are near you, you ask. If you’re looking for an accountant, you ask. If you’re looking for information about traveling to the farthest place on earth, you still need to ask by either speaking with a search engine, or typing the information.
There are many other factors to consider in search engine optimization, but using words is still the number one way to search for stuff. So why not tell the search engines what your site is about by using the best possible words you can find.
In the SEO world, we call these key words, key phrases and long tail key phrases. There’s an entire article on SEO in this magazine, so let’s just concentrate on choosing the right key phrases.
A key word is the word or phrase people look for on search engines when searching for a product, service, information or resources.
The best, fastest, easiest way to know which key phrases you need to implement throughout your web pages, is to do a bit of research. There are many free tools you can use to do this, including Neil Patel’s UberSuggest and Google’s Keyword planning tool.
Before using those tools, you need to prepare.
- List all the words and phrases that come to mind
- List words associated to the list of words you just created
- Ask other people which words they would use to search
- Use the Google search bar to give you more ideas by starting to type words. You’ll automatically get suggestions based on what others have searched
Once you have an extensive list of words, either use the Google Planner tool, or UberSuggest in order to get an idea of the following:
- Monthly search volume – This tells you how many people have searched for the keyword. It doesn’t make sense to rank for a keyword that no one is searching.
- Number of competing sites – This tells you how many web sites include the same key words
- Cost per click – This tells you what the cost would be to use PPC ad campaigns (See article on PPC for more info)
- Ranking difficulty – This tells you how difficult it will be to rank your website on the first page of Google. (This is not available in the keyword planner tool)
As you’re researching, you want to find key phrases that are specific, have a large search volume, and target your best audience.
- Using key phrases phrased as a question usually helps, depending on what you’re selling.
- Don’t use generic words like “Advertising.”
- Be as specific as possible. Ranking for “Advertising” does not yield the same result as “Advertising Agency.” The word “advertising” will have a much higher number of people searching, but it’s best to rank for a term that is more specific to your needs, even if it’s searched much less.
Whether you find one really great key phrase with high search volume, or one thousand words, the next step is to ensure that you appropriately insert the words throughout your website.
Don’t forget to find all the other words associated with the main key phrase. Latent semantic indexing (LSI) is a system search engines use to analyze the other words people use surrounding a given topic.
If the main topic is Advertising, an example of LSI within my web page would be to use the phrases “advertising campaign example”, “advertisement ideas for small business”, “what is marketing?”, or “types of advertising media.” All of these terms are highly searched, and support the main topic of advertising.
A few final points:
- Focus on one main key phrase per page on your web site.
- Don’t overuse the same key phrase throughout the page.
- Have as many pages as possible on your site with text
- Use the key phrases on your Alt tags for images
Edison Guzman is a marketing expert that shows business owners how to attract, convert and keep more customers so that they can grow their business. This article is part of a presentation delivered to business owners nationwide. It is also the steps taken when delivering services to clients. Everything taught has been implemented, tested, tracked and tweaked for best results. Learn more at HowToAttractCustomers.com