Get Your Audience Hooked: A Powerful Keyword Strategy for Maximum Engagement on Your Website and Content
“Keywords are the bridge between your content and your audience” – Brian Clark
Every search begins with a keyword.
Every website is ranked based on a keyword.
Every online advertisement is placed based on a keyword.
Your customer is looking to buy based on keywords.
You should also sell based on keywords.
- Identify keywords:
If you are writing your resume, look into the job description for the keywords.
Check out LinkedIn profiles for roles that you see yourself in, and mine those for relevant keywords.
Check out company and business function descriptions to identify keywords that you want to rank high for.
Once you have the right keywords, then you can write compelling content.
2. Get Long-tail keywords
The term “long-tail” comes from statistics. Where there are extreme values, there are fewer data points. The distribution of most data, displayed on a chart, creates the appearance of tapering off at the end; a “tail.”
For each additional keyword added to a keyword phrase, there are a smaller number of people searching for that specific combination of words.
Check out http://www.wordtracker.com/blog/introduction-to-long-tail-keywords for a good description on long-tail keywords.
The presence of a long tail for a particular keyword indicates that there is a group of people who are looking for very specific information. This is your target group. These are not casual surfers, but high-potential customers. They could be recruiters in your dream company and you want to write for them.
Targeting long-tail keywords has the following benefits:
- Those searching for the long-tail keyword are more likely to be your potential customers.
- Search engines can display results more accurately for long-tail keywords.
- There is less competition for long-tail keywords.
- Your site will stay high in the rankings for a longer time, relative to shorter keywords.
3. Identifying your top keywords:
To identify and gather keywords relevant to your site you must go beyond the obvious:
Identify 3-5 main keywords based on your ecommerce or blog site topic. One of these must be embedded in your domain name, such as Cheaptickets.com.
Use Google suggest (a.k.a. auto complete) and review the keywords indicated by “Searches related to.” You can also use Google Keyword Planner tool or other software in order to add to your list in this manner.
Even better, ask ChatGPT to give you a list of keywords. Then ask it to refine, and then refine some more.
Continue the process until you have 3-5 high potential “core” keywords and about 50 long-tail keywords.
4. Important attributes of the keywords in your target list:
A. Volume: They must have high search volume. This is for the keywords, and also for the search results produced by Google. High volume = more people are searching for this keyword.
B. Relevance: Less relevance means wrong audience. If your content is written for the wrong audience (i.e. targeting keywords will low or no relevance), you won’t get customer interest. For the right audience, you want to put out compelling content.
C. Commerciality: Present of ads in search results indicates that people are willing to pay for the resulting information, i.e. this indicates the presence of a market.
5. What do you do with the keywords:
A. Write content: Obviously you want to write content, compelling content. Blog-posts, white-papers, curated content, stories, etc. All these can provide insightful information to your customer and keep them engaged.
B. Monitor ranking: Monitor the performance of your content against the keywords. This will tell you how your site and content perform and give you a chance to tweak the same, i.e. improve SEO.
C. Write cornerstone posts: For your “core” keywords (the 3-5 that you selected), you want to write longer, more informational posts. Then add multiple hyperlinks to these posts.
D. Ensure keywords are hyperlinked to your other content: Ensure that each of your blog-posts has at least 3-5 links to your own blog-posts. Ensure that you have at least 2 links to external sites. Use keywords to insert the links on. E.g. instead of hyperlinking “click here”, put the hyperlink on “herbal cure for dry cough”.
E. Include in your URLs: Ensure your “core” keywords are in the URL slug.
F. Use advertisements for your keywords: When your competition has all but captured all your top keywords, then use ads for those keywords. Counter-intuitively, you can also place ads for the keywords where your content is ranking high (to ensure you capture maximum value for those keyword searches). Do this when there is sufficient volume of searches.
Keywords are the foundation of search engine results. Targeting the wrong keywords means that your content is invisible to your target customer.
At Accelevaite, our guides and courses help you write better and get noticed. Better writing is a sure way to find your next job, get customers to take action and generally have your ideas and thoughts recognized. You can build credibility and a powerful presence online with your writing.