Refine Your Keywords & Keep Your SEO Strategy Up to Date in 2019

Choosing the right keywords for your business is the foundation of an effective SEO campaign. However, as more and more businesses are doing SEO, the contest for the top spots on the SERPs, for the keywords that you want, is fierce. This is particularly challenging for today’s digital marketers, who have to identify keywords that strike the perfect balance between relevance, search volume, and competition.

Gone are the days of using Google’s Keyword Planner tool, finding the most popular keywords and creating dedicated, optimised landing pages for each of them. Using separate landing pages for keywords used to be an effective way to optimise your site for both ‘Digital Marketing Consultants’ and ‘Digital Marketing Agency,’ for example. But now, SEO is different.

Ahrefs carried out a study involving 3 million search queries. They found that a page that is in position 1 for one keyword, will also rank for almost 1,000 relevant keywords in the top 10 search results.

This means that there’s no certain number of keywords that a landing page is likely to rank for.  Optimising your page for more than one keyword is definitely a more effective, and efficient way of doing SEO in 2019. 

The following are some of the things to bear in mind when you are identifying the best keywords for your website.

Search Volumes Can be Deceptive

Search volume is used to give digital marketers an idea of how many people are looking for a certain keyword or phrase and as such determine how much organic search traffic the page is likely to get if it ranks well. However, a page that ranks for a popular keyword doesn’t always generate significant amounts of traffic, while pages ranking for low-volume keywords can lead more traffic to the website.

There are several reasons or this. First off, 16 to 20% of search queries that are asked every day have never been asked before. This means that Google’s database of keywords will be consistently updated and it’s unlikely that Google, or any other tool, is capturing all 33 billion ‘never before asked’ search queries every month. In addition, the search volume in Google Ads is an annual average, for example, terms around Christmas won’t be searched for most months of the year. The keyword planner does not take this into consideration and as such, search volumes may not be entirely accurate. Another consideration is that featured snippets and advertisers using Google Ads may be taking a lot of clicks from the top ranked sites for high volume, popular keywords.

Consider Search Intent 

When you are trying to identify keywords to target on your site, ask yourself what exactly the searcher is looking for and how your content can fulfil that intent. This is known as search intent, and it typically falls into four main categories. Informational queries ask how to do something or what something is. Navigational queries occur when someone needs more information on how to find something, such as the login for Twitter. Users enter Investigation queries to find out specific attributes of one product and how they compare to another. Alternatively, users may be looking to buy or download something and will enter a Transactional query. Once you have identified the keywords with intent that relate to your business, you can then use your blog or page content to target these terms.

Long-Tail Keywords are King

Targeting long-tail keywords and phrases can help ensure that your website ranks well in the SERPs and is getting traffic from this source. Long-tail keywords are traditionally thought of as search queries that are three or four word long phrases that are specific to what your business is selling. The rationale behind using these long-tail keywords is that when a customer uses a more specific search phrase, in most cases they are looking for something specific that they are interested in or want to buy. As such, these specific searches are more likely to convert to sales than generic searches.

Finding the right long-tail keywords for your business isn’t about the number of words in the phrase.  It’s about finding similar related phrases that are commonly associated with your business that may have a low individual search volume but have a bigger search volume as a group. These terms can be found using tools like Google’s Keyword Planner and Answer the Public or looking for the terms that your competitors are ranking for.

Make sure your business stays ahead of the game this year by focusing on SEO. If you need help with your SEO strategy and creating quality content get in touch with leading digital marketing company Auckland, Digital Squad. The team at Digital Squad can help you with effective content marketing Auckland and SEO Wellington.