When utilising SEO strategies, keywords should be a core focus. Using the right keywords can instantly make all the difference to the performance of your content, helping boost the visibility of your brand and business.
But…how do you choose the right keywords?
It’s important to strike the right balance between potential and relevance, so here are our top three tips:
- Ideation before choice
Before you choose which keywords to use, it’s good to create a bigger list of potential ideas, from which to narrow them down. This can help make sure you don’t overlook any keywords that could otherwise slip your mind.
You can create this list using different methods. One of the best ways to get started is by using SEO tools to identify all of the main relevant keywords, taking into account the topic, the industry, and the target audience.
You can also research your competitors to see which keywords they’re using, and how they’re performing. This is a particularly good way of getting a sense of how different keywords will perform with a similar customer base to yours.
It’s also important to consider the keywords your content is already ranking for, as anything that can be repurposed will save you both effort and time.
- Evaluate your keyword options
Once you have a big list of potential keywords, it’s time to narrow them down by evaluating each of them individually. As we already mentioned at the start, it’s important to strike the right balance between potential and relevance. In other words, your keywords need to hit the middle ground between having a big search volume and having a low difficulty ranking.
While search volume should be one of the key metrics you apply when making your choice, the keyword difficulty is what will determine your actual chance of success with their use. Your keywords need to be popular enough that enough people will search for them, finding your content, but shouldn’t be too popular that the competition is too high for you to rank.
It’s also important to remember that it can often be better to rank with slightly more niche keywords, in order to reach your specific target audience.
- Think about search intent
When you have your choice of keywords, we highly recommend verifying their search intent, to make sure they will provide the right results within your content. (By search intent, we refer to the general reason behind consumers using said keyword. It’s the intent behind the use of the word when searching for specific results).
The content in which you place the keyword has to align with the search intent so that it’s actually providing what users are after. This will not only help with ranking but also with the effectiveness of the overarching SEO strategy at play.
There are a few other things that you can do to choose keywords, and plenty of online SEO resources to make it easier on yourself. But by following our three top tips (ideation, evaluation, and search intent), you should be able to get started on finding the right ones.
If you’d like to read more digital marketing tips and insights, check out our helpful It Works Blog. Alternatively, find out how we can help you by getting in touch today!