Finding the right keywords for your business
A crucial element in getting exposure for your business online is finding the right keywords. Your keywords should be relevant to your business and should be something that your ideal customer avatar (ICA) is searching for.
Here’s a scenario:
You’re a photographer and you own a photography agency. Your ideal customer is an eCommerce business that makes Jewelry. You have a strong feeling that your customer is searching for your services, but you have no idea what they’re searching for.
This is where you’d want to identify what keywords your ICAs are looking for. You can identify this by doing what I like to call competitive keyword sniping. Competitive keyword sniping is when you use a tool like Ubersuggest to spy on the keywords your competitors are ranking for on Google.
Once you’ve found those keywords, you’ll then look at their pages that are performing well for those keywords and model your page off of that one. The only difference is that you’ll want to find gaps in their content and make yours 10x better. SEO is about finding what works and doing it better.
The step-by-step guide to finding winning keywords
Follow these step-by-step instructions in this keyword research section and you’ll be able to find great keywords that’ll help you rank above your competitors while bringing in sales for your business.
The first thing you need to do is find an established competitor in your niche that you want to compare your business to. This should be an apples to apples comparison, and the competitor that you choose should be very similar to your business, but on a larger scale.
For example sake, let’s say I own a photography agency and I want to compete with https://www.squareshot.co/. You should follow the steps below to execute the competitive keyword sniping strategy:
(Note: We’ll use Ubersuggest for this example so you can follow along for free.)
Step one: enter your competitor in Ubersuggest
When you enter your competitor in Ubersuggest, you’ll gain a lot of valuable insights. You’ll see how many organic keywords your competitors have, as well as the monthly organic traffic they’re receiving, their domain score and the number of backlinks that they have.
In this particular exercise, you’re only going to need to use the “SEO Keywords” section, which you can find by scrolling all the way down to the bottom of the page.
After you’ve located this report, you’ll see a multitude of keywords that your competitors are ranking for. You’ll also see helpful metrics that are associated with those keywords such as:
- Volume – The number of times someone is searching for a given keyword on a monthly basis.
- Position – The position the URL is ranked in Google search for a given term.
- EST. Visits – The estimated traffic this web page gets from Google for this particular term.
Now that you can see all of the keywords that your competitors are ranking for, the next thing you’ll want to do is click on the arrow next to the term that seems most relevant for your business.
For this example, I’ll click on the arrow next to “product photography.”
After selecting that keyword, you can see that I am now brought to a dashboard that gives more insights about that specific keyword. What you’ll want to pay attention to in this dashboard at the keyword level is the “SEO Difficulty” score. The SEO difficulty metric specifies how hard it’ll be to rank for a given keyword – the numbers that are higher are harder to rank for in comparison to numbers that are lower.
Qualifying your keywords for rankability
You can determine whether or not your website can rank for these terms by looking at what the SEO keyword difficulty score is and comparing it to your domain authority.
If your domain authority is higher than the SEO keyword difficulty score on Ubersuggest, then you’ll have a high chance of ranking for that keyword. When you’re doing your keyword research, this is the step that you should add in your keyword qualifying process.
To ensure that you’ll be able to rank to the top of Google, always compare your keyword difficulty score to your domain authority score. You can check your domain authority by using Moz Link Explorer.
Once you’ve checked your domain authority and compared it to the SEO keyword difficulty score, and you have found that your domain authority is higher than the keyword’s keyword difficulty score that you’re trying to rank for, you should add that keyword to your list.
How to best use keywords on your website and social media marketing
There are special places on your website, and even on your social media channels that you should insert your keywords. In this article, we’ll cover where to include these keywords on your website, on Pinterest and your Instagram account.
Optimal places to put your keywords on your website
As you already know, Search engines like Google aren’t human beings, and as such, they can’t converse with us the way we would with one another. In order to make sure a search engine can understand what your website is about, you must include your keywords in these parts of your pages:
Title tags
Your title tag is the title of your webpage. Your title should be descriptive of what your website is about, and the keyword that is placed in your title tag should always be closer to the left of your title. For example, if you own a Photography Agency that specializes in taking photos for ecommerce websites, then your title tag could say “Photography Agency | Product Photography for Ecommerce Founders.”
Meta Descriptions
The meta description is the description under the page title that describes what your webpage is about. See the example below:
It’s important to note that having your keyword in your title tag is not a ranking factor on Google, and it hasn’t been for the last 5 years. But when people are typing in your keywords on Google, if you include your keyword in your meta description, your keyword will become bolded and this will entice the user to want to click on your listing.
Heading tags
There are a multitude of heading tags. They signify the hierarchical structure of a webpage. There are H1s, H2s, H3s, H4s, and more. Your H1 is always going to be the most important heading tag to add to your webpage, and as such, it is recommended to only use one heading 1 tag per page.
Your keywords should go in your heading tags, they should be placed in places where they seem natural. In addition, when adding these keywords to your heading tags on your pages, you should always have different variations of your same keyword to use throughout the page. The goal is to avoid sounding too repetitive, but also adding these keywords to your page enough times to where Google understands exactly what your web pages are about.
Website URL
Your keywords should be in your website URL because it’s not only a good place for search engines, but also for users. When users see that your URL contains your keyword, they have a high chance of clicking on your URL.
Image Alt Text
Alt text or alternate text is an attribute added to an image tag in HTML. The alt text provides you with a place to include your keyword on your website.
How to use your keywords on Pinterest
There is one important thing that you always want to remember when selecting keywords for social media marketing. The keywords that you’re using on Pinterest should be relevant to what your Pinterest profile is about. When people are searching for keywords relevant to your profile, you want to be the one that pops up for them. Below are some of the places where you should include your keywords on Pinterest:
- ALT text
- Board titles
- Pinterest board descriptions
How to use your keywords on Instagram
Using keywords on Instagram serves the same purpose as using them on your website and on Pinterest. They are supposed to help you gain visibility when someone is typing something that is related to your niche.
Your keywords should be utilized in your display name, username, bio, hashtags, image captions, and your alt text. When you’re using these keywords in different places, remember to always use more than one main phrase. You should always have at least 3 different phrases that you’re trying to target. The purpose for this is so that these platforms don’t feel like you’re just stuffing in keywords for the sake of stuffing in keywords in your social media profiles.
And always remember: finding keywords for your blog and social media marketing is great, but it doesn’t mean anything if you don’t know how to use them correctly. Follow the process laid out in this article and you’ll not only be able to find keywords, but you’ll find keywords that’ll actually help you rank on Google.
Once you’ve found your keywords, make sure to use a client management software for small businesses to streamline your work.
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