Everything You Need to Know About Keywords

Keywords are an essential part of your business being successful. Keywords are what get you found on search engine results pages. In order to get great keywords for your business you need to do these three things:

1. Do keyword research.
2. Create content around your keywords.
3. Optimize content around a primary keyword.

The first thing that you want to do is your keyword research. Keywords are the words typed into search engines – the topics that searchers are trying to learn more about. There are several different ways to do keyword research.

• Make a list of keywords your buyer persona would search for.
• Expand that list by searching the web for alternatives.
• Determine which keywords people will be the most likely to use to find your site.
• Decide which keywords you have the best opportunity to rank for.

MAKE A LIST OF KEYWORDS

To make a list of keywords, you should ask yourself some questions. What are the common industry questions your buyer persona might have? What questions might they have that your company provides solutions to? What questions might they have when deciding to buy your product? When doing this, it’s important to mimic the language that your personas use so they can easily understand you. Also, by speaking their language, you’ll know you’ll be there when they search for you because you’ve figured out what they’re going to search for.
Let’s say you have a local dog training business. One of your buyer personas is a Dan, a man in his thirties that just got a new puppy but is having a difficult time training him properly. Take a look at the example questions Dan would ask:
What are the common industry questions your buyer persona might have?

• Training a puppy

What questions might they have that your company provides solutions to?

• Puppy training classes

What questions might they have when deciding to buy your product?

• Puppy training classes near me

CATEGORIZE YOUR KEYWORDS INTO THE BUYER’S JOURNEY

Use these questions from your buyer personas to help you brainstorm your list of keywords. Once you have your list of keywords, you want to categorize them by the stages of the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey is the active research process someone goes through leading up to a purchase. The most important thing to remember is that it’s in the perspective of your potential customers. That’s why figuring out your personas before looking at the buyer’s journey is important. You need to know and understand your personas before you can delve into figuring out how they move through the buyer’s journey. It’s made up of three different stages, the awareness stage, consideration stage and the decision stage.

EXPAND YOUR KEYWORDS LIST

At this point, you have done your keyword research and you have a great list of keyword ideas. Your next step is to expand that list with alternative keywords. To do this, simply search the web for alternative keywords. Type one of your keywords in a search engine and see what the results are. Once you do that, you can then determine which keywords people will search for to find your site.
DECIDE WHICH KEYWORDS YOU HAVE THE BEST OPPORTUNITY TO RANK FOR
For this step, you really want to focus on long-tail keywords. For example, “puppy training” is a short or broad keyword. It’s harder to rank for broad keywords because there’s a lot of competition around them and it’s a very general term. Ranking high for these types of keywords isn’t very realistic. Instead, try using long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are more targeted search phrases, rather than just terms, that contain three or more words. For example, “puppy training classes in Boston, MA” is a great long-tail keyword to focus on. It’s very specific and targeted.

OPTIMIZE CONTENT AROUND A PRIMARY KEYWORD

Now that you’ve chosen your keywords, you want to start optimizing your pages around a primary keyword. To do that, you want to add the keyword to your page title and URL. For example, “Primary Keyword | Company Name” and “mybusiness.com/long-tail-keyword.”
You then want to add the keyword to the body, headers and image alt-text. Search Engines can’t read images so it’s vital that you add alt-text to your images and it’s better to use your keyword in your alt-text. Having the keyword in the headers and the body of your page simply means having it appear in at least one header of your page and having it appear naturally in the body copy. Keep in mind that it doesn’t have to be the exact keyword phrase every time. Adding variation to the keywords will actually get you more views in the end because you’re trying to reach different ways your viewers would search for your company. Last but not least, you want to add your primary keyword in your meta-description. Each page should have its own unique meta-description that is no more than 140 characters long.
Another way you can optimize your page around a primary keyword is including relevant links with the content. Including relevant internal and external links with your content will not only help improve your credibility, it’ll help you get found on search engines easier. The best way to do this is by hyperlinking text with keywords that you’d like to rank for.
You want to be careful about not over using the keyword, Google can easily tell if you are keyword stuffing or adding keywords just for the sake of SEO so its important as you add them it feels natural and part of the content as it should read.

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Keywords are a time consuming thing that you really need to work hard on but once you do it and you do it correctly, it will absolutely pay off! We’ve put together some keyword tips and tools for beginners that will help get you started on keywords. You’ll learn the different tools like Google Adwords Keyword Planner, Google Analytics and Google Web Masters as well as some tips like starting local. You don’t want to miss out on these tips!