“What’s the magic word?”
Do you remember playing this game as a kid? You would block access to a fun activity unless your playmate could provide the magic word. Well, Keywords are essentially the grown-up version of a “magic word”.
Keywords are how customers can find you online. Search engines crawl your website to find the keywords that will determine what your site is all about – which tells search engines when to point potential customers in your direction. Seems simple, right? Well it may be more complicated than you think.
Below we will walk you through how to figure out the best keywords for your business and then how to seamlessly incorporate them into your website content and advertising efforts.
What makes a good keyword?
It can be tricky trying to stand out from your competition while trying to secure the top search position on Google. A good place to start is to choose a keyword planner tool. Many of these types of tools are free online, and can really help you to narrow down the relevant keywords for your business.
When doing keyword research, it is easy to get caught up in trying to rank for specific keywords. But you shouldn’t just focus on a target keyword, but also the search intent behind it. As a rule, the better your webpage answers a question, the better it will rank for a specific keyword.
So when it comes to relevance, the two questions to ask yourself are:
– What are the typical keywords my customers use to find me?
– How can I make my pages relevant to those keywords?
Business Name
The world has become more of a digital marketplace in the past decade, which allows many businesses to live solely in an online world. When you think about your business existing solely online, you can’t ignore search engine optimization when it comes to naming your business. You might think the best way to rank high in searches is to incorporate keywords in your business name. But, according to a report by Mediaworks, businesses with a unique name, and not one dictated by keywords, perform better in organic search.
You may want to focus on using keywords in your tag line and web copy instead. If you use keywords in your company name, you will be forever stuck in that category, you will sound generic, and you may not rank for the term anyway. Keyword brand names are expensive, create little differentiation and still require money to promote.
However – Names are powerful. You want your name to tell potential customers what your business provides while also standing out and being unique. You don’t want to compete with businesses that have similar names and are already well-established. A few searches to determine what names our competition is using and what domain names are available will really help you down the road when you are trying to get your website to show up in search results.
Website Content
Once you have identified the best keywords for your business, it is time to ensure that they are sprinkled appropriately throughout your website to increase your Search Engine Optimization (SEO), or rank high on google searches.
You will want to insert keywords into your website in the following locations:
– Meta Descriptions
– SEO Title Tags
– Article Titles
– Blog content
Simply having the best keyword in the world alone won’t help you rank high in searches. You will also need to have quality content that is not duplicated throughout the site.
Along with creating rich content, you will want to improve the title and meta description on each page of your site to better match the website keywords. The better you can make your site the go-to source for your product or service the better chance you have of ranking higher on Google.
Keyword Maintenance
You will want to conduct keyword research every few months to few years depending on the predictability of the keywords in your particular industry. Make sure you are monitoring your keywords to see what ones performing well, have dropped in their effectiveness, etc. and then use this research to refresh your website content.
Let’s change the way we market digitally!
At Webster Digital Marketing, we keep an eye out for the best keywords for our customers to boost their SEO. We would love to work with you to improve your online presence! Contact us today to learn more.