Keyword research is the backbone of any successful SEO campaign. It’s difficult to achieve your traffic and revenue goals without a strong understanding of what keywords you need to target, and how many searches each keyword gets per month.
There are two main types of keywords: long-tail and short-tail keywords. Long-tail refers to longer keyword phrases with more than three words, while short-tail refers to shorter keyword phrases with less than three words.
What are long tail keywords?
The “long-tail” refers to keywords that have a low amount of searches per month. The long-tail keyword strategy is where you target less popular, more specific keywords with lower search volumes and higher conversion rates.
For example, if your website sells camping gear, you should look for keywords like “best tents,” or “women’s sleeping bags.”
What are short tail keywords?
The “short-tail” refers to popular, high volume keywords that have a higher amount of searches per month. Using the same example as before, you would want to target terms like “camping,” or “sleeping bags.” These keyword phrases will typically convert better for your website.
How do you find the right keywords?
There are a number of ways to find and research new keywords. You can use Google’s Keyword Planner Tool, or other free tools like Ubersuggest for keyword suggestions and search volume.
If you have premium software like SEMrush, they will give you access to search volume data based on geographic location, and make suggestions such as broad match, exact match, and provide common questions your target audience are asking.
What is the Google Keyword Planner Tool?
One of the most widely used free keyword research tools is the Google Keyword Planner tool.
The Google keyword tool will find keywords that are related to your target, and then rank them according to search volume (i.e., number of searches per month). The higher a word ranks on this list, the greater its search volume and relevancy for ranking purposes.
If you have a budget for advertising, or are new to your niche with not enough content for long-tail keywords, you can purchase keyword phrases from Google’s AdWords platform.
This is the same as paying per click on Facebook ads but instead of targeting people who visit your site, it targets those looking for what you offer.
How start keyword research
The most important thing to remember is that you want keywords with the highest volume (the more searches per month) and are highly relevant to your business.
Since keyword research can be a daunting task, we recommend starting small. Pick one or two long-tail keywords related to your industry and start building out content based on those terms.
You should also keep an eye out for keywords that have low volume, but high keyword difficulty (how hard it is to rank) and spend your time on those ones.
For example, a blog post about “How to Build A Bed” might not receive many monthly searches, but the difficulty of ranking for this term would be lower than “How to Build a Shed.”
What about zero volume keywords?
It’s important to note that keywords with zero volume are good for targeting when you want to direct your content at a very specific audience.
It sounds counter-intuitive, but the truth is that zero volume keywords can be powerful when you want to target a specific audience.
How do you optimize content?
Besides the Webmaster Guidelines, Google doesn’t have a strict guideline for keyword optimization, but it does provide some tips that you can use to improve your chances of ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
The first thing you should do is make sure that your keyword phrase appears in the title and meta description tags of your content. For example, if I want to rank for “airbrush” then my post’s title and meta description will have those words near the beginning: Airbrushes – The Best Types of Fabric Paint Brushes.
Next, make sure the target keyword phrase is in your post. To do this effectively, it’s important to include variations of that word. Or you can even mention other words related to the keyword phrase by including them in the sentence.
What are alt tags?
Alt tags help search engines find your images so they can be indexed and ranked in the SERPs. The alt tag should include as many of the words from your target keywords, but it’s important to not make them too long or use irrelevant terms.
The word “alt” comes from the term ‘alternative text’, which refers to a way of adding alternative wording for an image when it cannot be displayed – often used in screen readers and for accessibility purposes.
Google gives preferential treatment to images with alt tags, so if you want your blog post’s pictures to show up higher in search results then make sure they have relevant keywords.
What is the URL slug?
It sounds… strange, but the ‘slug’ makes up the structure of the URL, for example www.yourdomain.com/keywords-here.html.
Search engines and browsers use the URL slug to find your content. Putting keywords in this field helps them identify relevancy for ranking purposes.
You should also make sure that you include these same words at the beginning of any links within your post so that search engines can easily index all relevant parts of a page, including images and links.