SEO. It’s all about keywords, right? But how do you know which keywords you should be using on your website?
First of all, let’s look at why we do SEO in the first place. Is it to get your website to the top of page one in Google? Maybe. But for us, that’s just vanity. For us, the goal is always to drive qualified traffic to your website. And in order to ensure that the traffic we drive to a website is qualified and relevant, we need to make sure they’ve arrived after searching for highly relevant search terms.
It’s not difficult to achieve page one results for long tail, niche keywords and drive a good volume of traffic, but if those keywords aren’t relevant, that traffic is unlikely to convert into anything more than a bounce on your Google Analytics reports. So we need to be focused less on the position in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and more on driving relevant traffic.
The obvious answer to “which keywords should I be optimising for” is “the ones your customers are typing into Google”. Sounds completely commonsense, yet we don’t always get this right.
We often focus on the keywords we would type into Google, despite us not being our target market. When we work within an industry, we have our own vocabulary. We have knowledge that our customers may not have and we see things differently. We’re likely to type in the name of our service or product we sell. There’s nothing wrong with that; we clearly know what we’re looking for. However, our customers are different. They may not know what they need or want when they start typing a phrase into Google’s search box. They may have a question, they may have an issue they need to solve, or they may use a different phraseology for something that we’re used to calling something else.
For example, when I used to work in the exciting industry of leisure vehicle insurance, internally, we would refer to caravans that you tow behind a car as “tourers” to differentiate them from static caravans that tend to remain in one place. However, our customers didn’t called them tourers, they just called them caravans, or sometimes “touring caravans”.
At the time, Google didn’t even associate caravans with the word “tourer”, instead it would surface results about tourer motorcycles. So we needed to rethink our keyword strategy.
Another example is you may do something that your customers know they need, but they don’t know the correct term for it. For example, you may be self-publishing a book and need help laying out the text inside the book to the correct size and specification for print. What you need is a typesetter, but unless you worked in publishing or design, you’d be forgiven if you didn’t know that that’s what they were called and you might search for “book layout design” or “internal book layout help”. So as a typesetter, you need to make sure you have these bases covered too.
So, we’ve established that we need to get inside the heads of our customers to work out what they might search for. That can be easier said than done! The next best thing is to look for search trends and search volumes over time. Tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner will give you this data alongside other keyword ideas that may actually provide an opportunity to optimise for keywords you hadn’t previous thought of, but have the potential to drive a lot of traffic.
You’ll also find this data in a handy browser extension for Chrome called Keywords Everywhere. For a small fee you can access search volume data and trends for any keyword or phrase you type into Google and they will provide a list of related keywords too.
If you’re struggling to decide between 2 keywords, for example, if you deliver online training, you might be torn between optimising for “e-learning” or “online learning”. Using a tool like Google Trends will show you which is the more popular term. It will also show you if a term is becoming more or less popular over time and you can look as far back as 2004.
Choosing the right keywords to optimise for is always a process and one that can change over time. Don’t think once your website is optimised that the job is done. Those keywords that looked good 12 months ago, might not be driving the traffic they once did, so it might be time to review them. Take the tourer example I gave above. If you do a search for tourer on Google (UK) today, you’ll see results about caravans and campervans. It’s very different to the results we were getting 10 years ago, so not only do people’s searching habits change, but so does Googles ability to find relevant results. With this in mind, we’d recommend reviewing keywords every 12 months to catch rising and declining trends and tweak your SEO efforts to capitalise on new opportunities ahead of your competition.
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