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Last Updated on January 17, 2020 by Work In My Pajamas
The internet is a huge space, with over 3 billion pages and counting, it can be difficult to find what you are looking for. For those that want to be found online, that means you need to be providing the information that your audience is searching for and make sure your blog, ecommerce store or service page keeps visitors engaged. Engagement can be achieved in a multitude of ways, however; in summary it comes down to having quality content that your audience want to see and can get value from.
Getting visitors onto your new website or blog can be tricky, especially if you are exploring topics that are already heavily written about online. To start with, you’ll need to rely on a lot of ‘word-of-mouth’ marketing and social sharing, this too can be difficult if you aren’t involved in any networks.
If you are looking to join a network, be sure not to go in swinging, introduce yourself, find others with similar interests – make friends – then, you’ll be more welcome to share your projects and online adventures. Going in too heavy to start will put people off and prevent you from creating meaningful relationships with others.
While you work on your social media presence and making friends in sharer networks, here are some useful ways to utilise keywords on your website;
Finding What Your Audience Are Searching For
To find the best keywords for your website, you’ll want to know what it is your audience is searching for and looking for answers to. For example, if you provide pet products, your audience is likely to be looking for topics around pet care and answers to questions such as “why does my dog roll in leaves” or “why does my cat lick me”. You can narrow this down further using local keywords for your area, for instance, when looking for a digital marketing company nearby, you might search ‘SEO services London’ or ‘digital marketing Cambridge replacing London/Cambridge with your local area.
There are many tools available that can help you find related topics, questions and queries people also ask when searching around a certain topic. Answerthepublic.com is a good example, enter a topic and it will provide a web of questions and queries that people ask from across the world for free! (Or select a specific region with a pro account).
You can also use Google Trends, Google Search Console and Google search itself, which will return a “What People Also Ask” section in results when searching around certain high-volume keywords. There are plenty of free chrome extensions too, Surfer is a relatively new extension but has seen some very positive feedback, alongside Keywords Everywhere and Wordtracker Scout.
Using Your Keywords Effectively
If you are going to be using long-tail keywords in the form of a question, for instance – for the keyword ‘dog collars’, with the long-tail “why should dog collars have GPS tracking?”. You need to be providing a quality answer to the question, simply asking the question and not answering it will not look favorable in the eyes of search engines and won’t offer any value to your audience. Without value, your bounce rates (the recorded percentage of visitors that leave the website without any further interaction) will fall between 90-100% and your traffic will dwindle, without ever taking off.
If you use keywords, whether exact match or long-tail, and they aren’t relevant to the content on that page or across your website, this will be seen as ‘spammy’ in the eyes of search engines and can see your website pushed down search rankings and very unlikely to appear on page one. If your website does get accused of being spammy, this can be difficult to come back from so plan your keywords carefully, making sure that any keywords you use are relevant to your website and provide value and engagement to your visitors.
Keywords are necessary for your audience to find you but shouldn’t be used without careful thought and planning. Remember, your website is your ‘best foot forward’ when attracting new visitors and potential customers so take the time to get that first impression right!
