Choosing the right keywords and phrases for your website
I recently wrote a post which covered my top ten tips for search engine optimisation success. In that post I briefly touched on the importance of choosing the right keywords and phrases for your website. I feel that as this area is one of the most important stages in the optimisation process (and quite often the most overlooked) that the subject required a closer look.
Identify the theme of your website
In order to identify a list of the most suitable keyphrases you first need to understand what’s the theme of your website, who’s your target audience and what types of keyword phrases will these users be using to find your website. Ask yourself some simple questions:
- What’s my website selling? Is it a product or service?
- Who is my target audience? Are they young or old? Family orientated? Business or Consumer?
- Will they be using consumer, business, manufacturing or industrial related searches or product specific searches to find my site?
- Does my website promote local, national or international services?
Choosing your Keyword phrases
Once you’ve identified the theme of your website and the type of web user that you need to target the next step is to begin researching the types of keyword phrases that will best attract potential customers to your website.
Begin by quickly brainstorming a list of keyphrases that relate to your websites theme and taget audience. To help with this consider asking family, friends, work collegaues or better still existing customers what phrases they would use to find your website? Then make use of a few online keyword suggestion tools to help you identify the best types of combinations and possible alternatives.
My favourite keyword suggestion tools are:
Wordtracker - This is a handy online keyword suggestion resource that’s been around for ages. There’s a free trial version available or a small subscription version. You simply enter a keyword and different alternative options are returned. Once you’ve collected your shopping list of keywords together Wordtracker will give you details of search volume verse competition and allocate a KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) value to each search term. This will help you identify the terms that have a high search volume but lower competition rating. The downside of Wordtracker is that the results tend to be very americanised, which isn’t very accurate if you are targetting a UK audience.
Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool - As google is one of the biggest search engines about and undoubtedly the main one people use then it makes sense to make full use of Google suggection tool. This excellent online resource will allow you to enter a keyword or phrase and get a list of alternative search terms along with information about the number of searches a month and competition along with a host of other information. Google’s suggestion tool will also allow you to enter a url and get a list of keywords relating to that website or page. In my opinion this is a very powerful tool and it’s free.
Focus on the long tail search terms
While you’re researching and brainstorming your keyword phrases consider focussing on the ‘long tail’ search terms (for example ‘holiday villas in Puerto Pollensa’). By focussing on these long tail search terms you’ll have a greater chance of achieving a higher search engine position for that phrase than you would by purely targeting single keywords such as ‘holidays abroad’ or ‘holiday villas’. Another benefit of long tail search terms are they will bring you better quality traffic leads.
Consider geographic or product specific search terms for better quality leads
Another long tail tactic is to target search terms that are geographically specific such as ‘Design Agency South of France‘ or ‘Project Management Consultants Cheshire‘. These search terms will help to distinguish your website from others purely because of the geographic location. For websites that are reliant on local traffic for their trade rather than national/international visitors this tactic is essential in gaining those all important quality leads.
If your website sells products through an online store then another essential tactic is to focus on Brand Names and Product Names. Simply put these terms will specifically target people looking for information on or to buy that particular product or brand name. Thus, giving you a better chance of converting that web user into a sale and they have already made the decision that they’re interested in that particular product or brand name.
As a keen amateur photographer when I was looking to buy my Nikon D50 Digital SLR Camera I quite often, while researching and comparing prices, used the search term ‘Nikon D50 Digital camera’. By using this product specific term I could quickly home in on the websites that were able to offer me the best information and prices for a Nikon D50 Digital Camera.
In a nutshell…
To summarise, when choosing the best keywords for your website I would advise people to firstly understand your websites theme and target audience, focus on the long tail search terms and use online keyword suggestion tools to help you refine your list.
Tags: Keywords, optimisation, seo, websites