What is a Keyword Strategy?
Keywords form the basis of any SEO campaign. While the technical aspects of your website — including site speed and security — are important, only by targeting the right keywords will you get the search engine optimisation results you are truly after.
And what are these results? Well, the goal of SEO is to increase the quantity and quality of leads to your website. It’s not simply enough to have more visitors to your site. These visitors need to be genuine and likely to be interested in whatever it is you are selling. Building your SEO strategy around the right keywords is key to making this happen.
Any SEO company in Melbourne will tell you that keyword research is about a lot more than simply typing a few terms into Google Keyword Planner and seeing what appears. There is a vast array of tools you can use to ensure you’re targeting relevant and achievable keywords that will lead you to SEO success.
What is a keyword?
A keyword is a term (or phrase) that describes website content. For example, if you run a plant store, relevant keywords for your site might include “indoor plants” “pot plants” “low light plants” or the location specific “indoor plants Melbourne.”
Not only do these words describe your website content, they’re also the terms that potential customers will type into a search engine to find your website. If the goal of SEO is to increase the quantity and quality of your website traffic, it makes sense that you want to choose terms that are relevant and commonly searched.
Teams that provide SEO services in Australia will often throw around any number of terms to categorise keywords — “short-tail” “long-tail” “geo-targeting” “broad match” “exact match” — the list goes on. As a business owner, you don’t necessarily have to understand this technical jargon. All that’s important is that you are working with a team you trust and are confident in their keyword research abilities.
Keyword research tools
When an SEO team starts any campaign, one of the first areas of research will always be keywords. You need to establish if a website is currently ranking for any keywords (they may be doing so naturally), what keywords are relevant, and what kind of keyword strategies their competitors are engaging in.
SEO experts rely on a number of different tools to carry out these activities, including:
- Google Keyword Planner
- Ahrefs Keyword Explorer
- Exploding Topics
- Keyword Surfer
- Ubersuggest
- SEMrush
Most of these tools offer both free and paid subscription models. The latter is likely to provide additional, vital information, such as search volume or keyword difficulty. Without this kind of data, you will be flying blind when it comes to setting expectations and measuring the impact of your campaign.
There are plenty of other avenues you can use to help find relevant keywords. Google’s autocomplete feature is a great way of finding similar keywords to those you may have decided to target. You can also check the “searches related to” section at the bottom of any Google search result. Even Wikipedia can be used to see what terms are commonly used in relation to your major keywords.
Building a keyword strategy
First thing’s first — it will take several months before you start seeing results from your SEO campaign. Don’t trust any SEO company in Melbourne that tells you otherwise — they’re likely to be engaging in “black hat” techniques that could see your website penalised significantly.
Building a keyword strategy requires not only selecting relevant keywords but those that are likely to produce results. In the case of our earlier example, “indoor plant store” might be the most relevant keyword for your business but it’s also likely to have a high search volume and be incredibly competitive. It could take years before you start consistently ranking for this keyword.
Instead, it’s best to go with a mix of search terms that are both relevant and achievable. You’ll also need to take into account the “organic click-through rate” or the rate at which search engine users typically choose the top organic search result. These days, Google presents users with a number of different ways to interact with search engine results. There’s paid ads, featured snippets, maps, video results, and more. With everything going on, some keywords have a lesser organic click-through rate than others, meaning your efforts may not produce the same results.
Above all, make sure that your keywords are relevant. You might find keywords that are easy to master and are somewhat related to your products and services. However, customers who discover your website via these keywords are unlikely to find what they’re looking for, which will only increase your bounce rate and negatively impact your SEO rankings — which is the exact opposite of what we’re trying to achieve!
Building a keyword strategy is an artform, one that takes real practice and skill. It’s also unique to each website. Look for a company that provides SEO services in Australia and takes the time to really understand your business and what you’re trying to achieve. Soon you’ll be gathering online momentum and won’t be able to keep up with the number of customers stopping by to check out your site.
