Keyword Research and Strategy

Keyword strategy and research are two of the most important factors influencing your SEO strategies. Keywords indicate the type of business that your website serves. They assist you in gaining traffic from users looking to buy something or looking for informative content on your website.

In Chapter 4, we examined the Google AdWords Keyword Planner tool. Google Keyword Planner, on the other hand, frequently displays terms and phrases related to seed keywords (base keywords that form the foundation of terms on your site related to your niche market); these are geared more toward advertising and result in bringing more traffic to the website through non-organic means (pay-per-click or AdWords). When you enter the term tennis into Google’s Keyword Planner, it displays words that are strongly associated with the keyword.

However, because almost everyone uses Google Keyword Planner, the results are ambiguous and cover a wide range. For example, enter tennis, select the United States as the location, and select the January 2015 to January 2016 date range. Figure 7-1 shows a list of terms on the Ad Group Ideas and Keyword Ideas tabs after clicking Get Ideas.

Tennis equipment keywords include tennis shoes, tennis racquets, tennis bags, and so on. These suggestions can assist you in developing your SEO strategy. (Google Keyword Planner is a fantastic tool that can help you achieve much more if you use it to its full potential, but that is beyond the scope of this book.) At the same time, you must understand that tennis shoes, tennis racquets, and tennis bags are extremely competitive. 

Small businesses cannot compete with the advertising and reach of enterprise-grade setups. As a result, targeting these keywords may not yield the desired results. Your keyword strategy is critical, and you must ensure that your website utilizes the various keyword-research methods available.

Types of Keywords

Keywords are typically classified into three types: head, body, and long-tail terms. Head keywords are typically one or two-word terms that cover a broad, generic range.

Head

These head keywords are not specific and serve no purpose. Tennis, for example, is an example of a head keyword. Tennis discussions can range from Wimbledon to tennis equipment, tennis shops, tennis live broadcasts, and tennis world rankings. Head keywords are used in a variety of topics and are extremely competitive, but they are ineffective for optimizing conversions.

Body

Body keywords are limited to two or three words and are specific. Online shoe shopping, for example, is a body keyword. Black canvas sneakers and Shirts online UK are two more examples. As you can see, they are tailored to a specific audience and are suitable for use in SEO projects.

Long Tail

Long-tail keywords are very specific and usually consist of four, five, or more words—for example, Aldo Amazon Canada online shoes. These terms are highly specific and are used by users as search queries. Organic Tea India online order Alibaba and Reebok black sneakers under $150 Amazon are two more examples.

You should focus on body keywords because they are not too specific and will help you reach a wider audience from various sources. If a user searches for tennis shoes in Toronto, Tennis shoes Toronto could be an example of a body keyword. Tennis shoes Reebok store Downtown Toronto sale is an example of a long-tail keyword. Can you tell the difference? The body keyword used here is not overly specific and can bring you customers from all over Toronto, whereas the long-tail keyword is extremely specific and only applies to the Reebok Store in downtown Toronto. As a result, body keywords are your best bet, and they may be more useful because they reach a larger audience.

Sources of Keywords

Finding relevant keywords can be a difficult task due to factors such as competition, budget, and search volume. You can look for relevant keywords through a variety of channels.

For example, type tennis equipment into Google search: in addition to the list of results, there are other searches related to your search query at the bottom of the page (see Figure 7-3). As a result, you can obtain keyword information from a variety of sources. Another option for searching is to use social bookmarking sites and online forums. Figure 7-4 depicts tennis equipment content. 

Figure 7-4 depicts a blog post about stringing techniques and stringing machines. This type of content would be appropriate for an informative blog on your website. This demonstrates how far you can go to find relevant information and keywords for your SEO processes.

Wikipedia, Ezine, eHow, How Stuff Works, Yahoo Answers, Quora, and Stack Exchange are a few reputable sources where you can not only find relevant keywords or long-tail terms, but also link anchor text to these sites, giving your site more credibility from an SEO standpoint. Enter tennis shoes ezine, for example, into the Google search box. When you look over the results, you’ll notice some useful information: Figure 7-5 \sshows that you can gain some relevant terms that are less competitive but useful for SEO.

There are two terms highlighted in Figure 7-5: athletic sneakers and cross trainers. These words may have a lower search volume than tennis shoes, but they can be useful because they have less competition and are more relevant. Other keyword tools besides Google’s Keyword Planner include WordStream’s suite of keyword tools (Free Keyword Tool, Free Keyword Niche Finder, Free Keyword Grouper, and Negative Keyword Tool), UberSuggest, and Soovle.

The Keyword Tool, available at http://keywordtool.io/, is another handy tool. It allows you to produce 750+ body and long-tail phrases for each seed keyword for free. This open source program, built on the Google platform, makes advantage of the finest of Google AutoComplete and Google Suggest. It also supports different languages and search engine portals like as Google, YouTube, Bing, Amazon, and App Store.

Let’s have a look at an example of how to use this tool to produce specialized keywords. Assume you’re looking for tennis equipment and shoe retailers in the United Kingdom. In the text box, type tennis shoe retailers as the seed keyword and choose United Kingdom as the location and English as the language. The outcome of generating keywords for this seed term is 89 keywords (see Figure 7-6).

To name a few, keywords created include athletic shoe stores, sports shoe shop Edmonton, exclusive tennis shoe stores, and top 10 athletic shoe stores. These words can be copied to the clipboard and inserted into Notepad or any other CSV file list. You may also submit the list to Google’s Keyword Planner to examine the search volume, CPC, and competition, allowing you to focus your search to phrases that are most relevant and have a high commercial value. This program also has a paid version called Keyword Tool Pro that provides more statistics such as search volume, CPC, and AdWords competition.

What counts most in keyword research and planning is the type of phrases you choose to simplify your website for consumers. Keywords like purchase, buy now, deal of the day, deals, and sale, for example, are predicted to lead to higher conversions, however informational keywords like How to, Free Download, and Installation method do not. Before determining which keywords to utilize, evaluate the conversion potential and commercial user intent.

Sizing Up the Competition

Before implementing any marketing plan, you should constantly examine your competition. Similarly, while conducting keyword research, there are websites that may assist you in learning more about your competition. SpyFu and SEMrush are the greatest tools on the market for completely assessing your competitors’ methods and keyword strategy.

SpyFu

SpyFu is a useful keyword research tool: it is a complete data mine that may assist you acquire insight into your rivals’ statistics. Google provides information on their organic searches, sponsored searches, and inbound links (both organic and paid). You may also obtain information for keywords that appear on the first page, top organic competitors, top paid rivals, shared organic and paid keywords, AdWords history, organic ranking history, and domain strength of competitors’ sites. As seen in Figure 7-7, you may mine critical KPIs to learn more about your competition’s keyword strategy, outcomes, and game-changing actions. More information is available at https://www.spyfu.com/.

SEMrush

SEMrush, like SpyFu, is a tool that allows you to go further into keyword tactics. This toolkit is a treasure mine for SEO keyword tactics, with everything from organic and sponsored searches, backlinks, referring domains, and organic keyword distribution to primary competition analysis, top anchors, and full-fledged reports. Figure 7-8 depicts a screenshot of a SEMrush interface examination of a site. More information is available at https://www.semrush.com/.

MozBar

MozBar is one of the greatest utilities for determining domain authority. You are able to

Check the domain authority, page authority, and spam score of your website, including Facebook. as well as Google+ activity MozBar is available as a Firefox and Google Chrome extension. For example, if you go to the Wikipedia home page, you can see the metrics on the right side of the page.

Figure 7-9 depicts the MozBar strip interface.

In addition to these indicators, link analysis analytics may be viewed from an SEO standpoint. You may also look at the analytics for your rivals’ websites to learn more about their referring domains, affiliate connections, and domain authority.

SEOquake

The SEOquake tool is a Firefox and Google Chrome extension. You may see information such as internal and external links, as well as keyword density, in addition to the page rank. You may do a brief audit on On-page factors to gain important information about two-word, three-word, and four-word phrases. Figure 7-10 depicts an SEOquake analysis of the Wikipedia home page. The several sections, such as Page Info, Diagnosis, and Compare URLs, lead to a quick assessment of your website. Similar to MozBar, you may learn about your rivals’ stats and build a strategy after researching their keywords and other SEO-related methods. Figure 7-11 depicts the SEOquake statistics for Wikipedia.

Boosting Your On-Page SEO Using Keywords and

Long-Tail Terms

After you’ve created a list of keywords and phrases, the following step is to incorporate the list on your website. The following are some ideas for incorporating keywords into your on-page SEO process:

• Title tags are vital for SEO since they inform search engines about the web page. Make sure your keyword is at the beginning or towards the center of your title tag. Make sure that each page has its own title tag. You can also input synonyms or similar phrases that have less competition yet have a high potential for conversion optimization and title tag simplification. Tennis shoes, for example, have a lot of competition and a wide selection. Instead, choose something less competitive, such as tennis boots and accessories. Furthermore, this type of long-tail phrase not only covers tennis shoes but also draws attention to tennis equipment accessories.
• Avoid stuffing terms into the title tag. For example, if you work in the real estate industry in Toronto, cramming comparable keywords for your specialty into the title tag repeatedly would be regarded spammy by search engines. Here’s an example of keyword stuffing in a title tag: Real Estate: Homes for sale, Houses for sale, Real Estate Sale, Toronto Real Estate Sale In contrast, here is a more simplified keyword-containing title tag: XYZ Realtors, Toronto, Real Estate & Homes for Sale The first example is spammy from an SEO standpoint because it employs too many of the same or similar phrases in one line in an attempt to manipulate and trick search engines. The second sample is succinct and specifies Toronto, Real Estate & Homes for Sale, and the name XYZ Realtors.
• Include keywords in the page’s content. In the content, you can only use a maximum of 2-3 keywords or related terms. Keep in mind that the material should be useful and informative to the user. If you’re creating a blog on tennis shoes, for example, you can include tennis shoes or synonyms (such as sporty tennis sneakers and cross trainers) in the article. If you fill your content with keywords, your site will be punished by search engines.
• According to research, the first section of a page’s information is more likely to be mapped and kept by search engines than the latter part.
• Wrap text around material such as infographics, videos, and photographs and use short words. Because of its user-engaging paradigm, interactive material with captions and visual text including relevant keywords or related phrases is evaluated higher. Using only text is tedious and does not engage consumers. With search engines’ capacity to recognize interactive media developing, it is critical to make the best use of interactive content in conjunction with relevant keywords for better results and higher positions in search results.
• Using keywords in your heading tags can also help you with your on-page SEO. If your page contains a lot of parts, you should utilize Heading tags. Begin with Heading 1 (h1>) tags and continue with Heading 2 and Heading 3 (h2> and h3>, respectively) tags for subsections. Use relevant keywords as much as possible in the material between these tags. To avoid a penalty, do not pack Headings with too many or irrelevant terms, as previously stated. Use synonyms or alternative text keywords in the Heading 2 and Heading 3 tags to help search engines recognize that the material is relevant and has a good workflow.
• Include keywords or related synonyms in URLs and internal text if feasible. Because SEO is so competitive, most URLs are already taken. However, if such a URL is accessible, you can employ relevant keywords. If feasible, use precise keywords in your anchor text. The keywords should be distinct and not generic so that search engines can determine whether they are relevant and being utilized effectively.

Summary

Keywords are an important component of the SEO process and should be used in your campaigns. You should conduct extensive research and avoid being manipulative, keeping in mind that user purpose and happiness are more essential than packing keywords or over optimizing to deceive search engines. The following chapter examines link building, which is at the heart of any SEO operation.