When it comes to digital marketing success and attracting new customers through the web, keyword optimization is one of the most important tools you can rely on. Keyword Optimization or Keyword Research is the process of researching, analyzing and selecting the best word or concept of high relevance to your product, service or campaign in order to target and drive traffic from search engines like Google to your website and other digital platforms .
Getting your website or blog on the first page of search engines can be a daunting task if you don’t understand the basics of optimization. While this tutorial won’t guarantee you the number one spot on the major search engines, it does point out what you need to do to get in the search engine optimization game.
It’s a lot easier than you think and this article aims to guide, help and provide you with the basics and key to successful search engine optimization:
Step 1. Choose the right keywords
It’s hard to be the best at everything, and that includes keyword optimization. The first step to getting to the top of search results is to identify the right keywords. It can be either a single word, multiple words, or entire sentences. As you may already know, most searches on the internet come in the form of a question. Therefore, before you start writing down the keywords, you need to decide which keywords you want to focus on. These are the words people would type into the search engines to find your page, blog, website, or product.
It is very important that the word you choose as a keyword is broad enough for many people to search for it on the internet, but narrow enough that you have a good chance of getting a high search rank for it in the search engines and results .
For example, the word “shoe” is far too general. However, “Where can I find cheap shoes online” is a pretty good question. Likewise, the word “Europe” is far too generic, and wiki sites usually dominate these top spots. So “the best holiday destination in Europe” is a much better phrase to focus on.
Here are my top tips for choosing the right keywords:
1. Start with the customers
Think about who your target audience or customers are. What are they likely to type into the search bar when looking for answers that your services can help them with? Why not ask existing customers what they would be looking for?
2. Weigh the competition
While it’s important for you to choose words that many of your target audience will type into search engines, they shouldn’t be words that larger companies with the most muscle and bigger budgets compete for.
3. Use Google tools
Don’t just guess. Google has several good tools that can help you find popular search terms.
Google Trends, a public web facility based on the Google search engine, shows how often a specific search term is entered in relation to the total search volume in different regions of the world and in different languages, including a list of popular searches. You can also enter keywords and see how popular they are compared to other phrases and ideas with similar terms to choose the one that gets searched for the most.
You can also find keywords using Google’s AdWords advertising tool. You don’t necessarily have to advertise, you can just create an account and choose using the “Keyword Planner” in the “Tools” menu.
Step 2. Customize your content
After you’ve successfully chosen your keywords, there are a few other things you need to do to help your website rank high in the search engines. One of those things is content creation. You need to create and distribute relevant and valuable content (such as language, writing, photography or any of the various arts) that attracts and engages your well-defined target audience. Content marketing helps us attract new customers and retain existing customers.
For existing customers, it could also mean participating in the relevant content that creates additional sales by learning more about what you’re offering, and products/services are more expensive than they were before. Here are some tips to keep in mind when creating content:
1. Working actively with texts
Use keywords in the title and preamble of all pages. Also include the keywords in the body, the higher up in the text, the better for your ranking.
However, be careful not to overuse your keywords. Google can interpret your website as a nonsensical page just trying to attract visitors and you end up in the search results. As a rule of thumb, your content should feel natural and interesting. Which of course is also important for your visitors.
2. Don’t forget your photos!
Even rename your photos with your relevant keywords. This allows search engines to index them and you can even get hit in image searches. If you have the opportunity to enter alt text for each image, don’t miss the opportunity.
Step 3. Get visits and links from others
The most important thing for search engines is to provide good and relevant results, remember this is their core business. Therefore, sites that are ranked highly or found to be good by search engines are preferred. An example is websites with links and many visitors who stay long to engage with the website. So this is really important for:
1. Make sure the site gets a lot of visits
Invite family and friends to visit your website. Get the link or URL out as often as possible, for example make a video, post it on YouTube and the links there – but integrate all content on your website and link there.
2. Ask others to link to your site
Ask friends, business partners or customers to link to you, perhaps in exchange for a link back or share interesting tips in your field and have other content post a link to you.
3. Share your website on social media
Sharing your website and content on social media (not forgetting Google+ Google for obvious reasons) is extremely important. It can generate visits to the website, more traffic, attention and higher rankings
4. Get visitors to share
Get others to share your website and content on social media using the share buttons. AddThis is one of the free tools that allows you to instantly share or bookmark pages with an easy-to-use tool. AddThis may also receive statistics on how often your content is shared.
Step 4. Revise the technical
How your site is technically structured is also important for your ranking. Here are some things you can do:
1. Use Google Webmaster Tools (now Google Search Console)
Google Search Console (aka Google Webmaster) is an amazing tool that offers many tools to help you analyze your website thoroughly. With this analysis, you can work on problem areas so that your website ranks better in search engines, especially Google
2. Make your website mobile friendly,
With a good percentage of the world’s population owning mobile devices these days, it makes sense to ensure your website is mobile-friendly. Mobile users also expect a good mobile experience when they visit the website.
If your website is not mobile-friendly, it may rank lower in mobile searches. Google recently released a major new mobile-friendly ranking algorithm that aims to give a boost to mobile-friendly pages in Google’s mobile search results, so you can’t go wrong with this offering.
3. Make sure the page is fast
A website that takes a long time to load will be ranked lower in search engines. Google has pointed out in the past that site and page speed is one of the signals used by its algorithm to rank pages.
Page speed is also important for user experience. The slower your website/page speed, the more likely you are to have a high bounce rate and lower average time on your site. Some of the great tools that can help you with your website speed are Google Pagespeed Insights and GTmetrix. These are tools that help you make decisions that will increase your site’s performance.
Step 5. Use web analytics tools
Use analytics to measure the outcome of your efforts or which areas of your site are performing well. Google Analytics provides free and enterprise-wide analytics tools to measure website, app, digital and offline data to gain customer insights.
Example: With Google Analytics, you can track visitors to your store and generate reports to help you with your marketing.
Under “Acquisition” in Google Analytics, select “all traffic” -> “Channels” -> “organic search” so that under “Keyword” you can see which keywords are generating the most traffic and which search engine is “source”. You can access it via Google Webmaster Tools in Google Analytics under “Acquisitions” -> “Search Engine Optimization”.
Step 6. Use Google AdWords
Businesses, no matter their size, want to be found on the first page of Google. Being seen by customers at the precise moment they are looking for your information, product, service, offer, or location is intentional marketing (marketing based on someone intending to find your products), and it is profitable.
Many businesses use Google AdWords to archive them by creating highly effective advertising campaigns to market their products and services, drive traffic to their website and ultimately increase sales.
I hope this article has given you an in-depth look at keyword optimization and you find one or more of the tips above useful.
