Choosing the right keywords for your website is not as daunting as you might think. All it requires is some reverse engineering. The whole point of keyword research is to uncover the keywords your potential customers will use when searching Google for your products or services and why. There is a psychology behind an online search. Once you understand it, you’ll be able to attract more traffic to your site by selecting the most appropriate keywords for your website based on competitiveness and relevance.
When implementing an SEO strategy your main function is to understand how people are searching online for your products or services, what they are looking for, and how to best deliver that information to them. It absolutely does not matter how beautiful or cutting edge or functional your site may be, unless you have content users are looking for it will do little to help your business.
When selecting keywords keep Searcher Intent in mind. When people search online, they do so for a variety of reasons. They could be shopping or looking for information to solve a problem or learning how to do something. Their purpose affects how they formulate the search query.
In general, people use many different queries when trying to find information about a single subject. For example, say a person wants to learn how to make pottery. He might use the keyword phrase “how to make pottery”. He might also go directly to searching for particular elements of pottery making like “beginner’s pottery wheel”, or “safe places for pottery making”, or “do I need a pottery kiln?”
Every search engine’s primary job is to provide the most relevant pages to an individual’s search query. Your website pages, therefore, should be dedicated to the question a user is asking and include relevant information the user might ask about that topic. If you own a pottery site, you might have a webpage about how to make pottery with other pages dedicated to other beginner-friendly topics linked from this initial page.
It’s good practice to provide answers to a variety of questions around a particular topic. If you have been in business for a while, you already have an idea about the questions people generally ask about your products or services. Providing answers to these questions on your website makes it both rank in the search engines for more broad focus keyword phrases like “how to make pottery” and attracts individuals who search using very specific keywords.
The best practices also apply when building out your website and pages. Say you own a PC Gaming website and want to attract searchers looking for information about games. It would not be at all effective to use keywords like “best games to play”. The word “games” is too broad. It might mean board games, party games, or console games.
It would be more beneficial to use keywords PC Gamers would use like “best PC games” or “desktop games”. Refining even further, you could use “best PC games of the year” or “best PC games of all time” or “best PC games for children” or “best PC games for multiplayers”. These are more specific. The more specific your keywords, the less competitive they become. The less competitive they are the higher your chances of ranking in the search engines for those related queries.
If you’ve written quality content using targeted keywords, users will be very engaged on your website as you are providing exactly what they are looking for. The more engaged a user is the more likely she’ll be to whip out a credit card and make a purchase or jump into her car and drive over to your store or place of business.