Why Keywords for SEO?

• Using keywords for SEO involves thinking like your audience thinks of language when seeking information solutions to their business and most specifically the question of how to evolve the business and incorporate those keywords into your site. This is very important to search engine optimization because keywords are indicators of content relevancy to search engines’ queries.
• When someone submits a query into the search engine, their algorithms seek the most relevant and highest authority content to display. Part of this process includes using keywords. These terms will appear in certain places on these pages so that pages where the search term appears in a title, heading, or other obvious sections of the text, are more likely to be seen as relevant when a user performs their search.
• Also, using keywords does not mean to just stuff your pages with all the possible relevant and related terms you can find. Search engines are looking for real and valuable and engaging content. So having the right combination of keywords and good content is vital.
• Keyword research will allow you to discover key terms that are most relevant to your business in a keyword tool, and also expose suggested related longtail keywords for the specific queries your audience searches.

Advantages of Using Keywords for SEO

Increased Visibility and Ranking: Efficiently using reputable and relevant keywords, you will have the opportunity to rank higher on search engine result pages (SERP) leading to increased visibility and clicks and organic website traffic. According to the SEO statistics, 91% of marketers indicated correct SEO creates a positive impact on web performance.

Targeted Traffic: When you optimize your website online through keywords, you are targeting a specific user, or individual searching for and using that specific term. This often leads to targeted web page visitors, or visitors to your wider website who may be more likely to engage, leading to improve engagement metrics for the targeting profession, reducing bounce rates and even improve potential for conversions.

Cost-Effective Marketing: SEO is one of the most cost-effective ways to acquire a prolonged and sustainable stream of traffic that doesn’t carry the full ongoing costs of advertising. If you know how to rank higher, you will be capable of expecting a reliable source of organic traffic and ultimately time.

Competitive Advantage: Depending on the thoroughness of the keyword research, and optimization of content around those keywords, you can achieve a competitive advantage. Even if your organization is succeeding in outranking just a few competing organizations on a few of the most relevant keywords, that can result in an increased share of the target market and allow you to be established as authoritative in the niche.

Understanding Behavior: Keyword research can be insightful and give you an understanding of the behavior of what your audience actually cares about and uses for their search behavior. You can professionally take that information and replicate it into your SEO strategy, final marketing initiatives, and marketing campaigns which can produce even more marketing content and marketing campaigns related to needs and wants of your current customers.

Longevity: SEO is (mostly) semi-permanent. You will have an allocation of time (and hard work) working on keyword optimizations for websites, but this will be a longer-term benefit. When you reach an established authority and/or credibility with search engines it will be easier to maintain your rank and even improve on your rank.

• Some case studies demonstrate cosmetics while optimizing keywords can produce real outcomes. A business-to-business (“B2B”) software company optimized the keywords on its website and increased its organic traffic by 78% and leads by 23%. Similarly, an e-commerce store utilized a complete keyword strategy and increased revenue by 50%.
• When you do the work to implement a good keyword research strategy, you take your SEO work to implement real results and not just small bumps in traffic and leads. Next, we will discuss which elements comprise a keyword strategy and first consider keyword research.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is an essential first step of any SEO campaign that has sustainability to it. It will describe what terms and phrases your audience uses in searching for something about your business, products, or service. Understanding those keywords will help you optimize your content, which both increases rankings and ultimately increases qualified traffic through search engines.

Keyword research indicates…

• The language of your audience – how they search and how they will speak about the topic or product.
• Any content gaps or opportunities that exist in your niche topic area.
• Possible value of keywords and keyword difficulty, so you can prioritize what to spend your SEO and content efforts on.
• The extent to which your content might match these search intents and therefore the type of user experience you can expect.

There are lots of tools and ways to do keyword research.

Google Search Console: It displays the keywords of your site that is currently ranking for, as well as your site’s conversions and impressions.

Competitor Analysis: It is used to know the keywords that is used by your competitors that is useful to find new opportunities for us.

When you think about the keywords that might fit good with your target audience, consider the following characteristics:

• Relevance: You want to target keywords that are relevant to your business, products or services.
  Search Volume: You will want to have some reasonable volume month over month for keywords. Higher volume keywords will generally have higher competition, so just be aware, that will be a factor.
  
• Keyword Difficulty: Be sure you take into consideration the keyword difficulty based on competition. Moz, and Ahrefs are two sites that will provide you a keyword ranking score, so you know what that will take to compete against.
  
• User Intent: You will want to take into consideration user intent for your keywords and create content that aligns with what the user is searching for. AI prompts for content marketing will assist in providing you with more valuable content, related to the user intent, and add even more value for the user.
  
• Longtail keywords: Think about long-tail, more specific phrases. Although they may not have as high of search volume, you will generally have more opportunity to compete.
  

Longtail Keywords

Longtail keywords refer to the longer and, therefore, more specific phrases that users put into search engines. Unlike broader, sometimes a single-word keyword (which are inherently vague), most longtail keywords are phrases that include three or more words and have a much more specific and narrower search intent. For example, a user might type in “shoes,” but then enter an even more specific phrase like “best running shoes for flat feet.”

There are several up-sides to making longtail keywords a part of your SEO strategy:

• Less Competition: longtail keywords are often so specific that they not only have lower search volume but generally, have less competition, so your content has a better chance of ranking higher.
• Higher Conversion Rate: Users that search for longtail keywords are typically further in the buying cycle, more likely to have made a determination of what they are looking for (such as specific shoes) and therefore are more likely to complete a goal, which can include converting as a customer or completing a desired action on your website.
• More Targeted Traffic: Longtail keywords will bring traffic to your site from visitors that are specifically interested in your products, services, or content; as opposed to generic traffic from broad keywords.
• Optimizes Natural Language: Longtail keywords are more relevant to the way people normally speak and write. By using longtail keywords in your content, you are making the user experience more engaging and conversational.

You may not always notice longtail keywords when writing content:

• You could incorporate long-tail into your titles, subtitles, body copy, etc by using natural language
• You could use alternatives/synonyms to avoid excessive repetition and keyword stuffing
• You would like to make sure and create content that sufficiently serves the user within whatever search intent they are using
• You will want to link internally to your other pages that are relevant with longtail keywords being used in the text you use for the link

Longtail keywords are the majority of all queries made to search engines. In fact, SEO data shows that there are 91.8% of all queries are longtail keywords.

Final Thoughts

Keywords play a critical role in driving SEO success. Understanding how keyword research works, selecting, and integrating relevant keywords into your content significantly improves search engine rankings, attracts targeted traffic, and enhances your overall content strategy.

• You can include long-tail into your titles, subtitles, body copy, etc by using natural language
• You can alternatively use synonyms and other alternatives to reduce repetitive usage to avoid “key” stuffing 
• You are trying to to think ahead to providing content that wholely serves the user, within whatever their search intent search terms 
• You will want to link internally to your other pages that to stay relevant with long- tail keywords in the different text the link contains

Longtail keywords account for the highest share of queries that people apply to search engines. In fact, SEO data has shown that 91.8% of all search terms are longtail keywords. So you can see that when you start keyword research and apply these longer, more specific phrases where there’s still low competition, you will be driving very relevant traffic to your site (helping to increase your overall SEO).

FAQ About SEO

1. Specifically, what do keywords mean for SEO?
   SEO related keywords can impact your search engine rankings and your ability to target the audience. Using keywords perfectly can lead to increases in your site’s online visibility.
2. How do keywords support SEO?
   Using relevant keywords throughout your site on-page content, meta tags, or your URLs can help search engines understand what your web pages are about, and when to serve your pages up for traffic. In this way, keywords provide relevant traffic to your site.
3. What is the first step in a keyword strategy?
   The first step in a keyword strategy is doing proper Keyword research and is the foundation of any qualified SEO initiative. Keyword research is performance evidence to identify who the user is in the target audience research and phrases they will use in search engines, relevant to your business, products, or services, and keyword research plays a very crucial role in keyword strategy.
4. What are longtail keywords and why do they matter?
   longtail keywords are longer, more specific phrases than a user types in a search engine, typically contains 3 or more words. longtail keywords matter because they are targeted to a more intent/ search intent and often lower than competitive broader keywords.
5. In what situations is it acceptable to use keywords in website content?
   Using keywords is best done in the page title and headings, as this makes it easy for google to see and lets the reader see too. Meta description should have keywords, and image “alt” text should include keywords – keyword should be used throughout the body of the content too. The focus should be more about providing value and meaningful experiences and not just keywords.
6. What do you mean by keyword stuffing, and why to avoid keyword stuffing?
   Keyword stuffing is an (outdated) tactic to trick google search. This is when you repeatedly put the same key phrase over and over again. The practice of keyword stuffing does: improve the reader experience; can negatively affect your SEO and overall – be bad practice. The best practice is to include keywords as an element in your text in a strategic and easy to follow narrative.
7. What is your secret for keywords and SEO success?
   The secret is working keywords into your text in a strategic way that produces expert content that the identified target client wants to engage with. If you are thinking of their needs when you put out good user experience, you can’t go wrong.