The Importance of Good Keywords for your SEO Project

Keywords are integral to the amount of traffic your website can potentially receive. If your website isn’t embedded with money-making keywords, it won’t receive as much traffic as it could potentially receive.

Good keywords can help your website attract customers in the long term, and it’s essential that you target the right keywords when carrying out SEO. In this article, we’ll check out what “good keywords” mean and how you can conduct vital keyword research for your website. Keyword research will lay a solid foundation for your website, helping it attract traffic and customers for years to come.

Why Do I Need Good Keywords?

Each keyword is searched by a certain number of people each month. So the keyword “gardening tools uk” is searched by less than a thousand people per month. The more people search for that keyword, the more traffic the first website ranking for that keyword receives.

Websites are ranked in order of how relevant they are to the keyword. This means that they might have the keyword in their title, in the web content, and in other relevant parts of the page. If the article answers the question or addresses the keyword in an informative (or entertaining) way, it will rank higher in the search results because the bounce rate would be lower and the time on site would be much higher. (Google also factor user experience metrics into their rankings of websites in search results.)

Therefore, your website is actually targeted around a certain group of keywords. However, are they profitable keywords? We aim to check this out.

To see how many people search for a certain keyword per month, you can see this in the Google Keyword Planner (www.adwords.google.co.uk). There are many guides online which show you to sign up for the Keyword Planner. If you have an AdWords account, you will be able to access the planner quickly.

Type the keyword into the keyword planner and you will find monthly search estimates for each keyword.

If your website is targeted around a keyword which isn’t searched for by many people, there is no way that you can receive a lot of traffic.

Instead, target your website around keywords which receive a lot of monthly searches. Ideally, for a small business, this should be around 2000 to 5000 monthly searches if you’re just starting out, and for larger businesses, you might be able to target keywords with higher searches.

However, with local keywords, there comes an exception. If you’re targeting a local area, the monthly searches would naturally be a lot smaller. For example, “gardening tools durrow” would receive a lot fewer searches than “gardening tools uk.” It might only receive a hundred searches each month, but it’s still profitable because these are a hundred people who are highly interested in buying from a gardening shop in Durrow. These people are more interested in visiting a local shop in Durrow, than buying from a well-known gardening shop anywhere in the UK.

Check Your Competition

Once you have found keywords which relate to your website and get a sizeable amount of monthly searches, you need to check your competition.

The competition basically includes all the websites which rank for that particular keyword in Google’s search results. So the top ranking websites for “gardening tools uk” include Homebase, Fiskars and Argos. A small business would find it difficult to compete with these websites – so perhaps, they could try ranking for local keywords instead.

If the competition contains a mix of middle-competition websites (websites that are not very well known, but still have a Page Rank of 2 or 3) – you should try to rank for that keyword and beat that competition.

Where To Put Keywords?

Once you have a handful of keywords selected, you need to start creating content around them so Google will associate your website with these keywords.

You should place these keywords naturally into the homepage (where it looks natural, remember!) such as in the title tag, in paragraphs, in menu navigation and in sub-headings. However, don’t place too many of them into content, because it will look shady and you could be penalized! A good rule of thumb is: Use them where you would naturally use them.

You can also write blog posts about these keywords and create high-quality content about them that will genuinely help a reader. This includes how-to’s, tutorials, infographics, informative articles, list-based articles, and so on. Not only will you start ranking for these keywords, but you’ll also attract much traffic from social media, too!

These keywords are classified as “good keywords” because of the following:

1. They receive a sizeable amount of traffic each month, which means that potential customers are continually searching for this keyword each month. That means a constant supply of traffic.
2. The competition isn’t too high, meaning you can try and get to the first page using other content marketing and SEO strategies such as linkbuilding.
3. These keywords are embedded naturally into the title tag, articles, web content, and “About Us” pages.

Conclusion

At first glance, keyword research looks like a complicated science, but in this article, we’ve broken it down into key, fundamental steps. It’s not that difficult once you actually break it down into a series of steps.

To summarize these steps once more:

1. Make a list of keywords related to your website.
2. Check for their monthly searches on the Google AdWords Keyword Planner.
3. Identify keywords with a few thousand monthly searches if you are a beginning website or a small business that has only been online for a few years.
4. If you are a local business, identify local keywords with a few hundred monthly searches or less (or more, depending on your local area).
5. Check for competition. If your keyword is dominated by large-name, well-renowned websites, it would be difficult to compete with them.
6. Start creating content around these keywords.

Conclusion

Keywords are the foundations for your website and they are the main piece of content that Google scan through when indexing their website. If you aren’t targeting profitable keywords, you won’t be able to receive as much traffic as you could potentially be receiving, so make sure to cast your net wide and search for keywords which are profitable and easy enough to rank for. This shouldn’t be difficult, thanks to the AdWords Keyword Planner.