Did you know that not getting keywords right can seriously hurt your business? We’re not trying to scare anyone but not maximising keywords often translates to your site having a poor chance of getting organic traffic. Once you get limited site traffic, the consequence comes in the form of fewer leads and, subsequently, sales. We’re pretty sure you can’t afford for that to happen.
Research has shown that 95% of people only look at the first page of most search results. In fact, half of the clicks on the said page go to the first three results that appear up top. And one way to make sure your site gets listed among the first three is to have effective keywords properly placed so search engines can easily match you with your target audience.
To do search engine optimisation right from the start, focus on a keyword or keyword phrase while creating content for your site. Insert the keyword or keyword phrase properly in the right places and you’d be telling search engines that your website is all about the keyword you featured prominently.
Finding Keywords That Work for Your Business
For Google to assign your pages in the right search ranking, you need a hand from relevant keywords. Pick the best ones and you can easily connect with a sizable audience.
To find the best keywords for your website, take note of the terms that you think your potential customers are looking up on search engines. You can then check their popularity manually or use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to determine their conversion rates.
Once you get a list of keywords for telling search engines what your website is all about, the next step is putting them in places where they’ll shine brightest.
Where to Put Keywords for Effective SEO
As you’re about to insert keywords into your website, you should know that there are key places where it makes sense to use them. Doing so optimises them enough to send the right signals to search engine bots, telling them what your website is all about.
Here are the places where your keywords/keyword phrases can greatly boost your SEO efforts.
Title Tag
By far, the page title is the most influential spot for your keyword. Search engines pay a lot of attention to the title tag and putting a keyword phrase in it often has a huge impact on your optimisation efforts. Just make sure your keyword is found at the beginning (not toward the end) of the title. Yes, position matters as well.
Putting the keyword phrase front and center of your page title means that it’ll be displayed prominently in search results. Do that and your keywords won’t only be helping Google bots but also potential site visitors. While you have 100 characters to use for the title tag (including punctuation and spaces), do your best to have the keyword show up in the first 65 characters.
Meta Description Tag
Although the page description doesn’t necessarily influence your website’s position in search results, it can influence clicks. It’s your first, and possibly last, chance to tell your customers what to expect when they visit that page of your site.
Note that the page description shows up as two lines of text in Google’s search results. Incorporating a great but succinct message while using a target keyphrase here can greatly influence anyone who is still unsure whether to navigate to your website or not.
Body Content
This refers to pages where you feature relevant articles or a sizable amount of text on your website. On the body of the said content is where you find Google looking for clues about the central theme of your domain. We can’t emphasise enough how crucial it is to put keywords here.
While you may be tempted to repeat your keyword or keyphrase in every corner and every sentence where you can, try not to. Stuffing the content that way will sound spammy and this strategy just doesn’t work at this point. Doing so may even be counterproductive as it only hurts your optimisation goals.
Ideally, the body of your content should include the keyword phrase and its many variations. And it wouldn’t hurt to use synonyms and antonyms either.
Inbound/Outbound Links
Having a keyword or phrase in an outgoing link has proven to be helpful with SEO. It doesn’t matter where it leads to—whether on your site or someone else’s—as long as it features a keyword.
Conversely, you want incoming links to point to your site through similar keyphrases. Although you don’t have a lot of control over such links, it would be helpful to ask the author of the content linking to you to use a keyword or phrase that matches well with a target page. It’d be great if they can cite and then link your company name like for example our company name Toprankings and added a link into it pointing to our company as a reference to a portion of the content, too.
URL
The web address to any page on your site has four major components and they should include a keyword or two whenever possible.
For the domain name, it’d be great to infuse a keyword here but you should know that most website owners don’t have a lot of control over this. Unless, of course, they got a domain name that absolutely matches their keyphrase right from the get-go.
As for the subdomain name, including a keyword here CAN help your SEO objectives. Notice the emphasis. The same holds true for sub-pages or folder names. So keyword.yourcompanyname.com and www.yourcompanyname.com/keyword/page.html are effective SEO signals to use, though it isn’t always necessary to use keyphrases in both instances.
The page name, however, is where keywords aren’t just an option. The actual page name should include one; otherwise, you’re leading search engines to a dead end. That is a wasted opportunity right there.
Images
Because websites nowadays incorporate graphics in countless ways or forms, it makes sense to maximise their SEO capability with a relevant infusion of keywords. Don’t overdo it, of course.
For this purpose, make sure an image’s file name bears a keyword or keyphrase whenever applicable. And if the pictures have gone through graphic editing programs like Photoshop, don’t forget to edit the title, description and keyword meta tags in the file and add a keyword there.
Keywords and Their Impact on SEO
Although some may argue that keywords themselves are no longer a primary ranking factor that they once were, what with all the Google algorithm updates, their use in your content and links is still crucial for any site optimisation efforts.
Place relevant keywords or phrases properly throughout your website and you’re actually helping your target market in finding you on Google and other search engines. This is why we offer an Unlimited Keyword service because we understand your SEO efforts depend on having as many relevant, high conversion keyphrases as possible.
If you’re interested in partnering with us, contact us for an obligation-free discussion and website review!
