There are some basic principles that companies must take into consideration when including practices that improve their web positioning (SEO), among them is the use of keywords as one of the most important. Search engines ( Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask among others) consider numerous factors when crawling and trying to understand your web pages. Keywords are part of these factors and become a primary element when creating particular content.
Let’s start with the basics. What are keywords?
In essence, they are terms related to the topics that arouse the interest of those who go to the Internet to investigate and solve their problems, since keywords group the central idea of a piece of content.
For example: How to choose the right light bulbs? can be a key question from a person who is doing electrical service at their house and needs to replace their old light bulbs with new ones. Almost always, behind web searches, there is a need that needs to be satisfied and the use of keywords (as in this case through this question) represents a direct mechanism by which that need can be satisfied, since they allow finding the content. precise that the person wants to find and learn more about it. Next, we will give you 7 key tips to make the most of your keywords.
1. Analyze your buyer personas
When it comes to doing SEO on Page, that is, optimizing the pages of your website, The main goal is to attract more traffic to your information. For your content to attract these strangers (first stage of the inbound marketing methodology ) you must investigate and find out which keywords are related to your company or industry.
Always start by understanding how the mentality of your buyer personas (ideal clients) works. They are the ones who, through their searches, become visitors to the different pages that are among the first results of search engines, and then become sales opportunities, clients and even promoters of these pages. So to find the right keywords for your brand, start by analyzing the audience you want to attract.
Determine who they are, what their goals are, what problems they have and what language they use when searching on the Internet. This will help you use your keywords correctly.because it will allow you to attract the right audience for you, that is the one who will connect with your value proposition and content.
2. Create keywords for each stage of the buyer’s journey.
Put yourself in the shoes of your potential clients and create a list of keywords based on the searches that they could perform in relation to the different stages of the buyer’s journey in which your potential clients are (recognition, consideration or decision). Remember that inbound marketing focuses on the needs of buyers over the characteristics of the products and/or services.
If we continue with the example of light bulbs, companies that are dedicated to offering these products must, in this sense, create a list of keywords that are related to the possible searches that their buyers could carry out in the different phases of the buyer’s journey, such as: when I should change my light bulbs (consideration of the problem), how to change the light bulbs in my house (recognition of the solution), where to buy new light bulbs (purchase decision). During this process, be sure to replicate the same language that your buyers would use when conducting their searches.
3. Provide specificity to your keywords
Take charge of searching for information yourself with that list of keywords that you made for each stage of the buyer’s journey, to analyze if these phrases truly direct people to read those pages that relate to you, or even if the search engine automatically returns as a result, your own page. It is very common that in this process you realize how general your keywords can be, that is, how they can yield results that involve other industries.
In this sense,Try to provide specificity to your keywords, that is, make them a little longer if that guarantees a more precise search. For example: “phones” can be a fairly generic keyword that can return millions of results, that is, your chances of being found as a company that offers technical services decrease. On the other hand, if your content has much more specific keywords such as: “smartphones with broken screens” or “smartphones in Madrid”, it is very likely that your buyer personas will land more easily on your website.
The keywords that seek to achieve this specificity are called “long-tail keywords”, they are a chain of words that manage to direct readers to much more specific content and therefore easier to find. People who use long-tail keywords represent qualified visitors who know exactly what information they want to obtain, that is, visitors who can be more easily converted into sales opportunities and later into customers. In the long run you will want to implement keywords with a good number of searches and a low level of competition.
4. Check the effectiveness of your keywords
There are various tools on the Internet that can help you check the effectiveness of your keywords within the content you publish on your blog. Google Keyword Planner and Keywordtool.io are some of the most used. These platforms allow you to see the behavior of your keywords in the most recent search of Internet users and know-how used they have been, that is, their level of competition. They also allow you to calculate their performance and evaluate how effective they are in generating traffic to your web pages.
Using tools to check the effectiveness of your keywords is important to measure the impact that the implementation of those keywords has had on attracting new buyers. That is if the keywords you chose are truly appropriate for your brand and generate high web positioning. Search engine keyword analysis is a fundamental part of any inbound marketing strategy. For this reason, analyzing your keywords periodically will give you the opportunity to modify and predict a poorly used strategy.
Webmasters Tool is a tool that Google has among its many products. Its main objective is to provide creators and content managers on web pages with the possibility of checking the indexing status of their sites and determining which keywords are strongest within the content, in order to optimize visibility among search results. In other words, this tool will allow you to know how Google crawls your website and generates statistics on the performance of your pages and keywords. In this sense, it is an excellent platform to check the effectiveness of your keywords and the position in which they appear in Google search results.
5. Include your keywords in the descriptions, titles and subtitles
Inbound marketing specialists recommend incorporating keywords not only in the content that you want to position but also in the descriptions, titles and subtitles that accompany that information. If we continue with the previous example: “smartphones with broken screens” would represent an ideal “long-tail” keyword to use, therefore, your goal will be to create web articles that include those keywords in both their titles and subtitles.
How to repair smartphones with broken screens? may be an appropriate title and What tools do you need to repair smartphones with broken screens? can be a congruent subtitle. Using this technique with your keywords will help you index your blog posts more successfully in search engines, thus increasing your chances of appearing among the first results.
6. Now yes, create valuable content based on your keywords
Although search engines are guided by the keywords used to provide more optimal results, the content that contains those keywords also plays a fundamental role. After devising your keywords based on your buyer personas, giving them specificity and analyzing their efficiency, it is time for you to create a wide range of valuable content around them.
Why is this so important? Search engines are increasingly optimizing to be intelligent; in addition to understanding keywords, they also try to understand the intention of those searching. Google, for example, tries to analyze in depth what you are really searching for. In this sense, they do not give you information that exactly matches the keywords used, but rather they seek to understand the content where they are found.
Thus, The information that provides context to those keywords is also essential to acquire web positioning, even more so if its main objective is to educate readers and provide them with new knowledge. Remember that inbound marketing in its philosophy recommends creating valuable and educational content for people. In this sense, if you unify valuable content with optimized keywords, your inbound strategy will have the necessary elements to shine. If you search for “inbound marketing” on Google, among the main results you will not see companies that offer these services, but rather educational content that allows you to learn more about what this marketing paradigm is about.
7. Take care of the density and size of your keywords
Keyword density is an important indicator to consider when it comes to SEO strategies. First of all, it is a percentage that tells us the level of appearance of a keyword, in comparison to the other words that appear in the texts. That is, to what extent the keywords are present within the content and how repetitive they become in it.
In this sense, ensure that your keyword density is low so that your readers do not feel that they are reading content saturated with the same information. When you make your lists of keywords, also create one of possible synonyms that allow you to give your keywords a break and generate fresh, readable and easy-to-understand content. Google penalizes pages that have an excess of keywords and categorizes them as “artificial” because it perceives an intention to manipulate the ranking of a site in search results, That is, it penalizes bad SEO practices because its purpose will always be to better position the most appropriate content.
Just as Webmasters Tool is a tool to evaluate the efficiency of your web pages and keyword indexing, there are other platforms that can help you quantify the keywords that are present in your texts, thus providing a density percentage. Among the most notable are: Keyword Density Checker, Internet Marketing Ninjas and SEOBook Keyword Density. These tools not only allow you to access the count of your keywords in the text but also in the titles, subtitles, meta descriptions and links of your web articles.
Keywords hide behind an extensive line of purposes that companies create, not only to acquire web positioning in search engines but also to attract the right audience. Each of the keywords that organizations use for their content symbolizes the opportunity to connect with some type of consumer and finally, to establish a relationship with them, which stimulates a purchase or the promotion of said content.