Why Keyword Selection is So Vital for your Online Marketing
One of the most critical areas that you will need to concentrate on is your keyword selection when running a digital marketing campaign. Selecting the incorrect keywords can make you waste a lot of time and money and generate traffic for your website that is not relevant, increasing your bounce rate.
The keywords you optimise your website and content with will tell the search engines what your company is all about and help your customers find your website, so you will want to do plenty of keyword research. Below is some advice on doing keyword research and selecting your keywords to help you get started and ensure you are on the right track.
Starting Your Keyword Research
The first part of your keyword research is to think of words and phrases that align with your business, including products, services, and locations, and you can use a spreadsheet for this. For example, suppose you are selling clothes for women on your website. In that case, you will want a variety of keywords and phrases relating to women’s clothing and individual items, such as trousers, skirts, blouses, and shoes. You will then want to use a keyword tool so you can look at the competitiveness of the keywords, and also the search volumes. You can use tools such as:
- Google Keyword Planner
- Ahrefs
- SEM Rush
- Keyword Generator
- Keyword Surfer
Think of The User Intent
You will also have to keep in mind the user’s intent when considering the keywords that you are looking to focus on for your marketing. A primary keyword for a clothing site may be “women’s shoes”, which is pretty generic and does not show much intent. So the person using this keyword may be looking for information rather than to buy, whereas someone searching for “cheap women’s shoes for sale” shows more intent to make a purchase.
Longer tailed keywords will often be less competitive and easier to rank your website for, so you will also need to incorporate these into your strategy. However, you will still need to have a variety of primary keywords in your marketing strategy. You may also wish to answer questions by selecting question keywords, which may see your website appearing in the featured snippets section of the search results.
Get Some Help with Your Keyword Research
It can be a daunting prospect for a novice to do keyword research, so you may wish to consider using the services of a reputable agency, such as Digital Search Group. With the amount of practice an agency has at doing keyword research, they will be able to do the job much quicker, and select a variety of keywords that are suitable for your business. When you have a selection of keywords that you are happy with, you will then need to ensure that they appear on the relevant pages of your site, in the content and also the meta-information, which will help you to rank for your chosen terms.
You will also need to consider link building, using a keyword as anchor text and creating a hyperlink that points back to the relevant page on your website. Link building is another time-consuming process that is not as straight forward as you may think, so it is another area that you may wish to seek professional help with to boost your marketing campaign efforts.
For more information on doing keyword research and ensuring you make the correct choices, there is plenty of online information on reputable websites such as semrush.com. Take your time doing your keyword research and seek professional advice when in doubt, and you can kick start your marketing campaign for your website and ensure you get the results you need for your business.
