Anytime is a good time to upgrade your marketing tactics. Whether you manage your company’s blog or write a few blurbs for your website – paying attention to keywords is critical to boosting your SEO.
What are keywords?
According to SEMrush, a leading SEO management tool, keywords are search terms that a website owner will use to optimize a website in the hopes of ranking at the top of Google’s results for specific keywords. For simplicity, keywords can also be considered words and phrases people type into search engines to find what they want. Therefore keywords are words and phrases that writers should be sure to include in their content.
Tips for strengthening your keyword usage
Having a website with nearly perfect SEO analytics is not easy to achieve, and don’t expect to increase your site’s SEO overnight. Small content enhancements over time are your best bet for strengthening your website’s overall SEO. Here are our top tips to enhance your keyword usage:
- A good first step when boosting your keywords is brainstorming what people might type in when looking for your product or service. Once you have a list of 15-20 words or phrases, ensure your content is written with these topics in mind.
- Choose a keyword or phrase from your article and ensure that it is featured in your title, the first paragraph of your article, and your meta description. This way, search engines will detect what your post is about.
- Type in your keyword or phrase to your selected search engine and note which articles currently appear in the top 3-5 results. It may be a good idea to draw inspiration from your researched posts. Pro tip: type in your competitor’s name and see which articles are showing up on their website, as their posts are another great place to pull inspiration from.
- Your selected keyword should appear 3-5 times in your article, not including your title or meta description. Make sure not to overdo it or write unnaturally, as search engines are sure to detect this.
Remember, boosting your website’s SEO won’t happen overnight. Start with these 4 tips to begin amplifying your content by using keywords. Also, if possible, you must post to your website and social media account regularly, at least a few times per week. Start by posting one blog per week and then link the URL to your social media accounts. Also, consider a ‘news feed’ on your website where you can post relevant articles from well-known publishers to help amplify your site’s credibility with Google.
With all of the website providers available to our industry, it’s important to find out how each uses keywords within their technology. It’s especially important to understand how your website vendor uses keywords to help increase your site’s SEO. Next, examine their content to ensure keywords are used throughout the articles on your site if your website vendor provides the article. Once you understand how your vendor uses keywords, you can determine if what you’re paying them is paying off for you.
