Learn how to use keywords like a seasoned expert and get a big edge over your competition. In doing so, your online business and marketing campaigns will greatly be more successful with search engine optimization and paid advertising by getting in front of a larger targeted audience as well as generating more sales.
Keywords… Brief Overview
Keywords are simply just words that you will be using to target whatever your content is going to be all about for your webpage. They should be logical and relevant to best represent the main idea of your content.
When starting a brand new webpage (Page or Post) in WordPress, it will prompt you to “add title” by entering your keywords. The keywords used for your title will also serve as the permalink (domain name + keywords for webpage title), which is essentially the URL of your webpage where it can be seen in the address bar of web browsers.
You should also keep in mind as to what a person might actually type into search engines (like Google search) to find a webpage about the topic you are writing about. So, when someone does a search query that matches your keywords (or close variation) used for your webpage, it would then be eligible to be displayed in the search engines.
Important Ways Of Using Keywords
The following are 8 important ways of using keywords to help you achieve better results with your online business and marketing campaigns:
(1) Keyword Research
(2) Seed Keywords
(4) LSI Keywords
(5) Buyer’s Keywords
(7) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
(8) Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising
Keyword Research
When doing keyword research, you will need to find a keyword (or keyword phrase) that offers enough search volume, but not so much competition to where it makes it overly difficult to have your webpage rank high enough on the search engine result pages (SERP’s) to be in the running of getting organic (free) search traffic.
- Keyword Search Volume – The amount of search volume over a certain period of time that people are actually searching for a keyword. The more search volume, the more demand that keyword will have. Of course, where there is great demand, there will also usually be great competition for that keyword – to fill that demand.
- Keyword Competition – The amount of competing webpages that are optimized for SEO purposes or that offer the best solutions for someone’s search query to best serve their needs. The more webpages that are highly optimized to rank for a keyword or that can best satisfy someone’s needs, especially those from authority sites, the harder it will be to get on page-one of a search engine like Google.
Furthermore, if you are going to challenge more competitive type keywords, you will also have to gauge the strength of the competition by considering other factors such as domain authority, backlinks and PageRank to see if it’s even worthwhile to compete against such stronger competition.
Fortunately, with doing keyword research, there are some excellent tools available that can:
- Greatly cut down on the research time
- Help you choose which keywords would be the best ones to use
- Find alternative keywords if the competition is too stiff for your planned keywords
- Find a happy balance between search volume and competition for your keywords
- Provide you with other important keyword data and statistics
The following are some great tools to help you succeed with doing keyword research:
You can also get free keyword ideas by entering the domain name of a website (or landing page) into Google Keyword Planner and see the keywords that such website (or landing page) is using. Make sure that the other website (or landing page) is in the same industry as yours to see relevant keyword ideas.
So, keywords can be like your best friends for your online business or marketing campaigns, yet they can also drive you a little “crazy” in the sense that you will have to strike a happy balance between search volume and competition.
Seed Keywords
Seed keywords only contain one or two words. They usually have a lot of search volume, but are highly competitive to rank for on the SERP’s. Typically, you will find companies that dominate their industry on page-1 of the search engines (like Google) for such keywords.
Let’s use a seed keyword like “computers” to get an idea of the keyword competition for it. Guess who’s on page-1 of Google for this keyword… all the big boys! (Amazon, Best Buy and Walmart etc.). This is definitely not a keyword that you would want to compete against since the competition is way too strong, especially when first staring out with your brand new website.
However, seed keywords are still needed to come up with the main idea of what your content is all about. Then they can be leveraged into longer keyword phrases with having less competition, and many times, much less competition. This is where long tail keywords (see below) come into play to better fight for a higher ranking on the search engines over the competition.
Long Tail Keywords
Long tail keywords consist of a phrase of words that contains your seed keywords. They usually have lower search volume and are not as competitive to rank for on the SERP’s compared to that of the more competitive seed keywords.
For example, let’s use the following Seed Keywords: Golf Game and Summer Vacation to see some possible Long Tail Keywords.
| Seed Keywords | Long Tail Keywords |
| Golf Game | How to Improve Your Golf Game |
| Summer Vacation | Tips For a Fun Summer Vacation |
Some of the major benefits of using long tail keywords include the following:
- More Targeted and Relevant to Search Query’s
- Higher Rate of Conversions
- Less Competition
- Cheaper Bidding for PPC Advertising
You will be more successful in ranking for long tail keywords in search engines rather than using the more competitive seed keywords, especially when first starting out with a brand new website.
LSI Keywords
As a keyword strategy to diversify the meaning of your targeted keywords in your content, you can use what is known as LSI Keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing).
Basically, LSI keywords are relevant words that imply the same meaning to your targeted keywords, but are altogether different words.
For example, let’s use the following Targeted Keywords: Sports Car and Televisions to see the related LSI Keywords.
| Targeted Keywords | LSI Keywords |
| Sports Car | 2 Door Coupe or Porsche |
| Televisions | Plasma TVs or Samsung |
LSI keywords will also help the search engines to better understand and to be more certain in correctly identifying the subject matter of your content.
Buyer’s Keywords
Using “buyer’s” keywords will greatly help you to target and capture motivated people who are already looking for something that you are promoting. Using such keywords will typically result in higher sales conversions since these are people further down the sales funnel ready to make a purchase rather than being further up the sales funnel just doing research.
For example, instead of using keywords like “walking shoes,” you could use “mens size 10 Nike walking shoes.” In the latter example, it is very specific to someone’s needs in what they are looking for in terms of a particular brand name, certain size and gender as well as the purpose of the shoe.
Keyword Match Types
There are 4 different keyword match types that you can choose from to instruct the search engines (like Google) when to display your PPC ad on the Internet as to the keywords used for your ad campaign to those used for someone’s search query.
Keyword match types include the following:
- Broad Match
- Broad Match Modifier
- Phrase Match
- Exact Match
(to learn more, click on What Are The Keyword Match Types)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Keywords that you choose to organically rank for in the SERP’s should be targeted and relevant to the main topic of what your content is all about on your webpage. For on-page SEO best practices, keywords should be used in the following recommended ways:
- URL (Permalink)
- Title Tags
- Meta Descriptions
- Heading Tags (H1:H6)
- Content (Used Sparingly & Naturally)
- Anchor Text
- Image Alternative Text (“ALT tags”)
Using your keywords in such ways will help you have a greater chance of getting your webpage ranked higher above the competition on the SERP’s. As a result, you could get more free search traffic coming to your website.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising
Keywords are also used for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to trigger your ad online. Using targeted and relevant keywords for your PPC ad campaigns can attract highly interested and motivated people to whatever you are marketing or promoting.
With PPC advertising, you can get traffic to your online business and marketing campaigns really fast. Essentially, you are paying your way to be eligible on the first page of the SERP’s in the paid advertising section instead of “earning” your way to the top in the organic section of the SERP’s using SEO techniques – which may take longer for it to come to fruition to get free search traffic.
Finally
Learn how to use keywords wisely and get a leg-up on the competition. You can achieve far greater success with having more targeted and motivated traffic coming to your online business and marketing campaigns whether you are trying to get free search traffic (SEO) or buying it (such as PPC).