Do you know how to find keywords for your business? We have to keep on our toes with Google, with all their algorithm updates, but despite this, the constant in all this is the need to optimise our websites for keywords by keeping up with keyword research. However as time has gone on, the way we search for keywords has changed.
What Is A Keyword?
This is simply a word or phrase that we search for in a search engine. Whenever you do a google search you are entering a keyword….
If I click on one of these results, I am taken a website that is ranking on the first page of google for ‘dog treats’.
That is the what every business is striving to do when they choose to write content using a keyword. Their target audience will search for a keyword, that will bring their website up. The target audience will be impressed with the content and it will lead them into action – either purchasing the product or service. The keyword has done its job!
The plan is to find relevant keywords for your business that will put you on the first page of the search engine, so your audience will find you and come to purchase from your website.
You probably noticed from the Google Search above that there were about 273,000,000 results for ‘Dog Treats’. You have to be pretty lucky to be ranking on the first page of the search engine for that. For a new business that is not going to work for you, unless you pay to be a premium ad which will be costly particularly for an up and coming business.
What Is Keyword Optimising?
So for those of us that run businesses that don’t have budgets for premium ads on Google (me included!) we have to make keywords work for us.
The first part of optimising your articles with keywords is to make sure your content has enough instances of the keyword, that the search engine will pick out and find what you are offering.
So how do you do that ?
- Use the keyword( or phrase) in your title.
- Use the keyword( or phrase) in the first 200 words of your article.
- Use the keyword (or phrase) in the meta description.
Once you have done this, you write freely. Don’t be tempted to continue harping back to your keyword after that, otherwise that may well work against you. The content must be written naturally, Google with its algorithms will decide if your content is relevant to the search query and rank you for your keyword term so if you have scattered the keyword through your article, the chances are that it is not going to read well, Google or any other search engines will pick up on this and penalise you for it, having the opposite effect you are looking for.
This is all part of the SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISING (SEO) you require for your articles to be ranked.
Keyword Research
To write keyword rich content, you need to better understand your target audience, and what they are searching for and how many of them are searching for it. This is powerful if performed correctly.
Keyword research takes time, but understanding customer goals and focusing on this when you do your keyword research, will reveal who they are and what they want. Their intent is pivotal in ranking with the search engines.
Case Study
BooSports ( A New York based Designer Bamboo Sports Wear)
So, Jonas, the business owner, wants to get more traffic to his website, he’s looking for more corporate customers to create customised sportswear and needs to understand more about the corporate customers he wants to attract.
More needs to be understood about this section of customer.
* What shape/designs are the corporate customers looking for?
*What terms are they searching for?
*When do corporate customers search for sustainable sportswear?
*Why would they buy sportswear made from bamboo?
*Where are they located?
By Jonas considering these questions, he can discover the characteristics of a corporate customer and what they are looking for in his products. It is a crucial planning step that cannot be rushed, to discover the keyword content searches to improve your targeted articles.
Discovering Keywords
You are likely to have some keywords in mind that you want to rank for, these might or might not be high ranking keywords. If they are high ranking keywords, it is likely you will not get traffic because they are too popular – remember the dog treats….
With 273,000,000 results, the likelihood of you ever seeing a customer is almost nil.
The plan of action here is to choose keywords that are of interest in target terms but have a lower search volume and are less competitive – These are called ‘Low Hanging Fruit Keywords’ – like ripe fruit that hangs low on a tree, smaller and more plentiful than the ones at the top, these are keywords that have a lower ranking but there are tons more of them, because there is naturally more competition for the fruit at the top (high traffic keywords)
So working out the best keywords for you is to know the search volumes of keywords so you can prioritise which you want to use and pick ones that will give your website a good advantage by finding the low hanging keywords.
There are tools that you can use to help you in your search so you know you have chosen KEY keywords – Jaaxy is one of these keyword tools. Follow this link to go read my article on Jaaxy and how to use it. – ‘What Is Jaaxy? A Keyword Tool Review’
You can also use another technique called ‘Alphabet Soup’ – Jaaxy can also help with this as it has an integration within it to do this in a matter of seconds but essentially put your keyword into Google ‘ Dog Treats’ then type a …. see what words Google comes up with that people are typing, then delete the ‘a’ and type b….. and so on, taking note of any interesting combinations of keywords. You can then go put them into Jaaxy and see what search results come up…. looking for those low competition keywords to bring you traffic.
Why Choose Low Competition Keywords?
Seems to be a contradiction to choose a low competition keyword…. If you are Amazon or Macy’s you probably have a huge advertising budget. I for one do not have any advertising budget, so when I am writing an article, I go and do keyword research of low competition keywords – Longtail Keywords – my articles rank successfully on the first page of Google by taking this pathway, costing me nothing.
Yes.. my traffic might be low….. to start with. This is not a quick process, those with the millions to throw at advertising can get quick results, but this process works. There is much more conversion from low competition keywords….. look at my graph below.
As you can see there are is LOT of traffic at the long tail end….. People who are searching for ‘bicycle helmet’ are not really going to purchase.. they are browsing because they don’t know what they want. Those searching ‘Childs green bicycle helmet‘ are a little more discerning in what they are looking for, but still really not there, so they search more…. then they search ‘Boys Custom Dinosaur Bicycle Helmet‘ – now they have their credit card out and are tapping it on the table !
This is not saying that there aren’t people who when searching for bicycle helmet won’t click on one of the results that comes up, they will, but unlikely as its too broad a search term.
The problem is that Google isn’t sure exactly what they are wanting….. For example ….. Ice Skates…..
Google doesn’t really know what you want, so brings up a wide range of choices. The net is too wide…. Google isn’t even sure if you want roller skates? So you can see that by choosing a keyword that is more specific, a long tail keyword, you will get more of your customers actually converting to a sale.
Related Searches
Have you ever noticed that when you search for something on Google that when you scroll to the bottom of the first page, there are more searches under ” Searches Related to….”
This section is a gold mine of keywords that have been typed into Google when looking for ice skates … Take one of these, type it into Google and scroll again…
This brings up more potential keywords. You can put them into Jaaxy to see how competitive each keyword is.
Using the strategies here, you will build up quite a list of good quality keywords to use on your website to build traffic naturally without having to resort to paying for advertising.
Keywords are so important. It is all about digital marketing. I used to think that this wasn’t marketing but it is. Keywords is like tagging and one must know how to write properly to know how to chose the correct keywords. You knw back in college when one had to write in APA or MLA style? Its the same thing; posts have its style as well.
Thanks Linda for your comment, its true they are, but a sort of secret tag that Google understands!
Thanks for this excellent post on finding keywords for your business. It is always good to read these posts, even though you think you already know what keyword research is because you always pick up something new.
I currently use Jaaxy as my preferred keyword research tool, because it is so quick and easy to use.
Thanks for reminding me about related searches when you scroll down to the bottom of the page. I had completely overlooked this method, and it is also a great way of getting keyword ideas.
Thanks Michel , I hope it helps you get more traffic !
A very cool article regarding keywords so thanks for sharing. I am still really learning just what keywords mean to increasing traffic to your website. I assumed that the most popular were the ones to go for when creating content. However, that doesn’t seem to be the case from what I’ve read. Also I assumed that the more keywords you have in your content the better. Could you explain to me why this isnt the case please?
Thankyou Rina for the comments. There are only a few places to use the keywords in your content, as I mentioned in my article, if you over do it, the content does not flow and make sense, Google recognises this and penalises you so you must only use it in the headline, in the first 200 words of your article and in the meta title. The rest of the time you write with freedom. As far as the keywords you use, do not use ones that are highly competitive, you will never rank against those that pay for their rankings, and you will never end up on the first page of google, thats your goal so use low hanging fruit and find the low competition keywords you will still get a ton of traffic and make those conversions.
Thanks for the guide on finding keywords for my online business… I am running an affiliate marketing business and I am trying to come up with at least 50 long-tail keywords in order to hire some writers to put together articles around them.
I was using uber suggest until now but my niche is very narrow and it couldn’t really help me. I have never tried this alphabet soup technique so I’ll give it a go!
Thanks a lot!
Hope it helps you Harry.
Hello Quinn! I want to first commend you for the page build up and some technical graphs to explain keywords, but my main challenge is, as a newbie who has no idea about narrowing niche and keywords, it will be a little confusing, because i have been confused myself on the onset, even as i write this, i will be going back to my post and editing my keywords, i guess that’s why my late posts has not been indexed. So how about you add up about how to narrow your keywords to getting better and easier ranking, narrowing your keywords to the low hanging fruit according to the expert Kyle.
But in general. you are very good to go and i like the links surrounding your post, it’s related to your post. I hope this helps. this is my website and you can also reach out to let me know how i can improve and serve better.
Best Wishes and Much Love
Captain M.
Thanks for you comments, I think you will see that i have suggested how to get to that low hanging fruit and narrow down your keyword research in that you give more definition to what you are wanting to talk about. I used the example of the child’s bicycle helmet – no point searching for this, its too broad, but getting down to Boys Blue Dinosaur Bicycle Helmet is low hanging fruit. Jaaxy also helps with this.
Thank you for sharing such an informative and inspiring article. Keyword research is very important to every website owner since the main goal is to get a better rank in google and other search engines.
Another point for serious consideration is in understanding your customer’s goals and focusing on it when doing your keyword research because this will reveal who they are and what they want which will also help you with developing the main content.
The tips you gave as a guide for keywords research are great and something i would not only try but recommend for others especially the related search paragraph. I never saw it as a gold mine of keywords but thanks to you, i will start using it for my Jaaxy research. Thanks once again for sharing!
David!
Thankyou David, I hope it helps you with your keyword research .
Hello Quinn,
So nice article you have written. We may have a web site, may have a platform for our online business, but without ranking these all are poorly useful. So search engine optimization is needed. Thus there arises the keyword search question. Keyword searching is most important to make a good ranking. Thank you to show the whole process for research. Thus will help to improve the ranking.
It is a misunderstood process and cannot be rushed. Keyword optimising is the only way forward .
Ranking is another things to put into consideration after gathering unique contents. Many people believe that keywords is responsible for easy ranking on Google trend. If that is the case, what’s the role of SEO? I read a review that says we should consider the taste of the people as keywords and make it to be balanced with the available low competitive keywords on the keywords research tools. This review just open my mind again to the instance whereby the keywords I have in mind might be a very popular keywords that are very competitive. How do we know if a keywords is highly competitive? This is a very informative review. I’m able to learn that the keywords should be available at the first/upper part of the post for easy Google analysis when ranking.
Keywords are very important for content, there is no point in writing using a highly competitive keyword because you will not rank well. Jaaxy is a very good tool to use to tell you which keywords are best for you to use.
Hello Quinn,
You have written so nicely about keyword searching. This is so important to know about that to make a web site ranked in the first page for our online business. So Keyword searching is most important to make a good ranking. Thank you to show the whole process for key search. Thus will help to improve the ranking
Thankyou for your comments.