Identifying Effective Keywords for Your Business

All businesses that want to establish sharp visibility on the Internet need to perform thorough keyword analysis as part of their search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.

Choosing the most effective keywords for your business is critical. Identifying the correct keywords takes a great deal of time and effort. However, the payoff for all of the hard work will definitely be worth it.

The first thing that you need to understand is how important keyword selection is and how to most effectively use your keywords to embellish your marketing strategy.

Your keywords are the foundation for everything that you will do online. Once you know which keywords bring you the most (and best) site visitors, you will create ads around those keywords; send out emails on topics related to those keywords; write blog posts and articles that discuss those keywords; and create videos, special reports, and books centered around those keywords.

In other words, they are the words that describe your website so that customers can find you. Keywords are the words that your potential customers would use to describe what they need from you.

Keyword research

Before putting any keywords on your business’ website, it is very important to thoroughly research keywords that are relevant to your business. The research is one of the simplest and most essential steps and without it; everything that you have done with regard to SEO will have been futile.

You need to empathize with your target audience. You should ask yourself how they would search for your products and services on the internet. Remember to be specific when it comes to choosing keywords that will enable your audience to easily find your products and services. Keywords that are very general will lead your audience away from your business when the intention is to make it easy for them to get to you.

There are some keyword research tools (some that cost money and some that don’t) that you can find online, which will show you specifically what your users are searching for. Some of the research tools will show you data of visits to your website over a time period. They are helpful because they not only let you track what your customers and potential customers are searching for but also for how long they have been searching.

Once you have identified your keywords, you can strategically sprinkle them throughout your website content. You do this so that you will achieve as high a ranking as possible in the search engines. Be careful not to put too many key words on the same page because search engines consider that “keyword stuffing” and your website could face a penalty for it.

Evaluating keyword competitiveness

Keyword competitiveness will have different definitions, depending on how the keyword is used. Social media marketing applications, such as Twitter and Facebook, use keywords to catch the user’s attention.

So when you research keywords for social media marketing, use the high volume, high-competition keywords because these are the most popular to the public.

However, for SEO use, it is a totally different matter. High-volume keywords are highly competitive and thus, it is very difficult to obtain search engine results’ page visibility.

You should ask yourself, “Can my website be competitive using my preferred keywords? If the answer is no, you should do additional keyword research.

Keyword strategy

If your keywords are too specific, you may achieve top ranking, but very few people will visit your site. Your goal is to choose SEO keywords that help you to achieve top ranking with a reasonable amount of effort and money.

Generally, the most effective SEO keywords are also being used by a large number of your competitors. In that case, don’t be tempted to use them because you probably won’t achieve the ranking that you want.

You need to pull out the keywords that have a lot of relevance to your website, relatively less competition, and high search volume. The result of this is that your keywords will be of more benefit to your business than mere high-volume competitive keywords. You will also need to figure out how difficult it is to achieve a high ranking for specific keywords.

Using the keywords

So let’s say that you’ve come up with some key words that describe your business.
What do you do with these key words?

Using the key words you choose, you will:

• Choose a website address with your key words in them
• Create ad campaigns using your key words
• Write emails, blog posts, and articles based on key words
• Optimize your website for certain key words

If you apply these methods to your business online, you will move closer to achieving greater success through more visibility.

To learn more about how keyword research and SEO is essential to the success of your business, please visit us at CompuKol Communications.