Keyword research and optimisation is one of the most vital aspects of creating a solid SEO strategy. Finding and using the right keywords throughout your site and content will help drive your site’s SEO score and ranking possibilities.
After years in the SEO world, I have tried and tested a range of different keyword research methods, and have some firm favourite tips and tools that I go back to time and time again – because they provide fantastic results!
See my top five tips for optimising your keyword research and implementation, as well as the basics of why we need to use keywords in our SEO practice here.
What Is Keyword Optimisation?
Keyword optimisation is focused on ensuring your website drives the right traffic to your website, which will in turn, help your website rankings and improve your site visibility.
It’s all about how visible your website is and harnessing keywords your target marketing will search. Your keywords should make it clear to search engines what your content is about and which search queries it relates to.
In short, choosing the best keywords will help you better target your audience and gain more valuable traffic to your site.
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How Do You Do Keyword Research?
Thankfully, there are a whole host of tools we can use for effective keyword research and optimisation. From Google AdWords to SEMrush, Ahrefs to Google Analytics – SEOs and content writers have a range of free and paid tools on hand to help their keyword research.
My top five tips for keyword research can be applied to those using both free and paid tools, so lets jump right in!
Top 5 Tips For Keyword Optimisation
1. Target Your Audience
Your audience is everything when it comes to content and targeting, and even though keyword optimisation is considered a technical way of pleasing search engines, it still needs to be relevant to your end-user.
Consider what your audience are looking for and the types of content or products they’d want to see on the search results for these keywords. You should get into the mindset of your target audience and consider the search queries they would use as a jumping-off point for your keyword research.
Establishing what your target audience will search, read and use is the vital first step to keyword optimisation and should be a driving force through all your keyword optimisation – remember, you’re here to deliver fantastic content and websites for search engines and users.
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2. Find Keywords
Next up, you can get to grips with finding a list of keywords for your site – and this is the heavy research side of things. Using Google Analytics or tools such as SEMrush’ Keyword Magic Tool, delve into your keyword topics to pull out high searched keywords relating to your website’s topics.
To begin with, brainstorm a list of keywords and phrases linked with the content on your site, and then you can add these keywords into the search tool to see if it is a valuable keyword. Remember, to include a range of search volumes and traffic scores so that you’re getting a broad spectrum of keywords on your website and your competing on a level playing field.
As you’re finding good keywords, add them to your keyword mapping file and make a note of the analytics linked to each word.
3. Map Your Keywords
Once you’ve got a list of words you want to target, it’s time to decide where on your site you want each one to go. Keyword mapping is a crucial stage to keyword optimisation and it helps you avoid future content cannibalisation.
By mapping out your keywords, you will ensure your site has clear keyword targets for each page and prevent your site internally competing for page rankings on multiple keywords. This will help your website gain visibility and search positions across a number of keywords and linked to a variety of site pages.
As part of your keyword mapping, you need to determine what content will be on each page and ensure that each page is distinct from the others to prevent competition and cannibalisation. To help with this, you could undergo some market research and see what types of content appear for each keyword and relate this to your site’s keyword and content strategy.
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4. Add Keywords To your Site
Once you’ve selected your keywords and decided on which pages they’ll go, it’s time to start adding them in! You can do this by adding them to existing content or by creating new content pages to house your keywords.
Developing a blog content plan is a fantastic way to target specific keywords or long-tail keywords, as well as a great opportunity to develop your EAT ranking and positioning as an area expert.
5. Don’t Keyword Stuff!
No matter which way you go about adding your keywords, it is crucial that you avoid keyword stuffing! Keyword stuffing is when you load a page full of keywords but at the expense of the content, and this will take away from your focus, your audience.
Remember, the goal is to have a human reading your content, taking in the information and then trusting your brand, and keyword stuffing will detract from this. Keyword stuffing will make the content difficult to read and potentially alienate your audience, which will cause a poor user experience and the possibility of users leaving your site.
Further still, as Google and other search engines get more sophisticated, they have learned how to identify keyword stuffing and will rank your page down if it is spotted. So, not only will keyword stuffing alienate your users, but it will also negatively impact your SERP ranking and SEO score – avoid at all costs!
This is why optimising your keywords is so crucial, it’ll ensure you have selected the best keywords to weave into your content and naturally use to improve your site visibility.
So, there you have my top five tips to keyword optimisation for SEO, let me know how you get on with them on Twitter @absolutelyben
For more information on SEO keyword optimisation, or to enquire about content services to implement your keyword strategy, talk to our expert team today on 0800 088 6000.
