An important part of search engine optimisation is how to find the best keywords. To do this, we need to consider who our target market is. Imagine your blog right now and think about what is your target market actually looking for? We need to get into their head and think about what conversations are going on in their mind, what problems and issues do they have? What would they be thinking about or typing into Google before they discover our blog? What would we like them to discover our blog on?
You want to make sure that you have your target firmly in mind so that you can choose keywords that are going to attract that target into our website. There are various ways to find good keywords. Go to Google for suggestions. Remember to assign one keyword per piece of content and put it into the relevant places. Always think of the user first. For the actual application, Yoast can help.
Try your best to think like your audience.
Get into the mind of your user
Think about getting into the mind of your user. Let’s say you’re in the process now of creating an article or creating a blog post. You get into the mind of your target market.
Use Google to find the most relevant keyword
One of the easiest ways to do good keyword research and pick keywords is to head over to Google and start typing some keywords that are relevant to the particular blog post that you’re typing in.
If you’re doing a blog post on how to prepare food or how to organise your kids, head over to Google. Start typing in ‘kids’ organisation’. As you’re typing it in, see what Google suggests.
That will give you some great insight into what is a good keyword to choose for the particular blog post that you’re writing. Sometimes you might even hit ‘search’ and scroll down to the bottom of the search results. Right down the bottom you’ll see, ‘search results related to organising kids’. It would be whatever keyword you type in there.
Underneath that, Google is going to recommend what it thinks are some relevant keywords that people are typing in. So you can use Google as a way to cherry pick the best keywords that you can start to use. That is probably the easiest way to do it.
If you want to get serious about this SEO and really level up, you can also have a look at a tool called Market Samurai. It’s a keyword research tool. They have got a free module and they’ll help you do the keyword research to find your keywords.
Assign one keyword per piece of content
Every piece of content you create, you really want to assign one keyword to that piece of content. You think, this article is about this keyword. It’s important that the keyword matches the content. There is nothing worse than going to Google, typing in a keyword, clicking on a search result and getting on a web page and finding, this has got nothing to do with what you typed in. You hit ‘back’ and go back to the search results to try to find another listing.
Google is watching that sort of thing, so if that happens, for them, that is a bad signal. You want to make sure, if you’re going to pick a keyword, that it matches the actual content you’re delivering. That is step one when it comes to on-page optimisation.
Place your keyword in the relevant places
Once you do that, it’s about each blog post getting one keyword assigned to it. Then we just need to put the keyword in the relevant places. You put it in your title, you put it in your description, you can put it in your URL, in your blog title and in the body content.
Let’s say you have a title ‘Website User Experience,’ that’s the keyword that we’ve effectively selected for a particular blog post. It will be in the title right up the top in the menu bar. It will be also in the URL. The title of the post could be ‘How to Create the Best Website User Experience,’ so it is in there as well. Then you put it in the body copy as well.
Think user first
We’ve chosen a keyword and then we’ve put it in the relevant places. Whenever you’re creating a piece of content, it’s always important to think user first. If you need to compromise on trying to squish a keyword in, just because you think you’re doing good SEO, but it makes the user experience bad, then it is not a good decision. It’s always better to think about the user first and optimise for the user. If you optimise for the user, you give Google what they want and you’ll ultimately win long term.
As a general rule of thumb for good SEO, if you say user first, SEO second, what you want to be doing is thinking about your blog post, do a little bit of keyword research, pick a keyword and then make sure the keyword is in these relevant places.
Re optimise your past posts
If you’ve got a blog and you’ve got thousands of posts or hundreds of posts and you’ve been posting for a while and you’ve never really given SEO much thought, it’s a good practice for you to go back to your past posts and re optimise them. Have a look, try to pick a keyword, try and put keywords in the relevant places. Google will continue to come back to your website and crawl. By doing that, you might get extra visibility in the search engines. It is a little bit of low hanging fruit.
You’ve already done the hard work and created the content. Why not make sure that you’ve optimised it so that you at least get the best visibility that you can inside the search engines?
It’s okay to fix the past.
Try the Yoast plug in
How do we do this when it comes into the actual application? If you’ve got WordPress, the best plug in, and it’s free, that you can get is a plug in called Yoast. It just makes it so easy. There are other SEO plug ins, but of them all, this is the best. Definitely take it on board and you would be well advised to install this plug in and then basically follow it.
It will help and give you advice on the on-page optimisation. It will talk about choosing a keyword, your focus keyword, they call it. Then it will make sure you put that in your title and in your description. You can make sure you put it once or twice in your body copy.
It will also give you a little preview of what that is going to look like in the search result. They call it the snippet preview. That makes it really easy to do that SEO side of things.
When you install it, it will actually do a lot of the technical things for you. It’s quite smart and does that out of the box for you. It will create the relevant site map if you want. You can go ahead and submit that to Webmaster Tools. It will make sure it de indexes some of your categories so that you’re not getting duplicate content indexed on your blog..
If you haven’t yet got an SEO plug in, that’s fine. There are plenty of different SEO plug ins. The other one that people use is All in One SEO. If you’ve already got that and you’re already half way down the rabbit hole, it’s not worth chopping and changing, you can stick with that one. But if you’re coming into this fresh, Yoast is going to be one of the best ways you can go.
Who are you optimising for?
Google knows synonyms.
With all of this optimisation and as you go through and you go back through your site, just always remember who are you optimising for? Just keep it firmly in mind. Sometimes when people hear about SEO, they think, wow, I’ve really got to try to squish this keyword in here. But if it compromises the usability, then don’t do it. Try and pop it in where it fits and where it makes sense.
The keyword will oftentimes naturally occur. If you’re choosing a good keyword for a particular page, it will appear in the content anyway. Google is getting smarter and smarter about finding synonyms and other words that have double meanings. So for example if you’re writing about outdoor decking and then in your blog post you talk about verandas, Google is getting really good at saying, outdoor decking, verandas, or pergola or whatever, they are the same thing. They’ll start to join those things together. So just write naturally and really think about giving great quality content to your users.
Benefit from good keyword selection
When selecting keywords, think about your target market and try to get into their mind. Use Google to find some great keywords, put them in the right places, but above all think about the user first and SEO second. If you choose your keywords right, they will naturally appear in your content.
If you are in a situation where you haven’t done much SEO, go back and try to do a little bit of optimisation. You’ll get some great benefits.
Do you know how to find the best keywords? We can do it for you and more! Check out our SEO and online marketing packages on this page.