You now know how you would describe what you do, and you have also put yourself in the shoes of your customer to think about how they would describe what you do.
You have used a keyword research tool to try and discover what kind of average monthly search volume those kinds of words get.
You also understand that you definitely want to target terms that your audience is searching for, but that it will be useful to target terms with a lower search volume because they are less competitive.
You also now know that often, the higher the search volume, the greater the competition and effort required to achieve organic ranking success, but if you go for highly specific lower competition words you may hit gold.
These words are called long-tail keywords.
So if your selling magazines, it would be awesome to rank at the top for that word.
But if you think about it, that may also draw visitors who want nothing from your ‘type’ of magazine. You may be all about cars, yet drawing visitors who want a craft magazine.
Long-tail keywords are the ones to consider here because they often convert better because people are being more specific and detailed in their search.
To use the magazine example someone searching ‘monthly Ferrari magazine subscription’ may be better than just the more competitive term of the magazine because they are ready to buy, and someone searching magazine is probably not.
A great tip on your FAQ part of your website is to add the type of questions people are asking about your area of work, in search terms. So if you can uncover those kinds of questions, and put them on your FAQ page that could be a really low cost/effort way to boost your site rankings.
Another tip is to think about the area in which you work geographically to see which terms are more relevant to people from that area. Liverpool in the UK would be a good example whereby the word ‘Boss’ there means ‘good’ yet in other parts of the world it also means your employer. So thinking about preferred terms in your geographical area of work, if that’s is relevant of course, i.e. your perhaps own a shop is another thing to consider. In other words, a search term that you use in one part of the world maybe not as relevant to another part of the world, so this needs some consideration.
Tools to help you work out the value of a keyword.
- Keyword explorers – you can google this as there are so many to chose from.
- Google Keyword Planner – Google’s AdWords Keyword Planner is a good starting point for SEO keyword research.
- Google Trends – Google’s keyword trend tool is another good tool to play around with.
- AnswerThePublic – Answer The Public listens into autocomplete data from search engines like Google then quickly cranks out every useful phrase and question people are asking around your keyword.
- SpyFu Keyword Research Tool – Download Your Competitors’ Most Profitable Keywords and Ads For Paid and Organic Search
Good luck and as always get in touch with Pencil and Coffee for a chat and to discover other ways in which we can help boost your marketing.
