Brendt Glaunert – Digital Marketing Specialist
The language you use when setting up a website should do more than just sound nice; it also needs to bring in customers. Having the best copy in the world won’t matter if no one makes it to the site.
To increase traffic to a site, you don’t just need good words, you need keywords.
From a fundamental SEO standpoint, keywords are the terms that your customers are putting into search engines when they’re trying to find your products or services. An effective keyword strategy includes matching the language on your site to the language your customers are using in the search bar, naturally bringing your site to the forefront of their search results.
These three steps can help implement a simple keyword strategy that has shown to organically improve site traffic.
Step 1: Investigate Your Competitors
Your direct competitors are likely using a lot of these same digital strategies. Running through a list of these companies and auditing their sites for keywords and phrases can give you a solid list of terms to incorporate into your own site.
Organic competitors are also important to monitor. These are the websites that come up along with yours in a search, regardless of any direct competition. Auditing these sites too, especially ones that are performing better than yours in SEO, can expand your list of keyword terms.
Step 2: Identify Your Target Keywords
Using the competitor research and your own understanding of your brand, products and services, you can now start to build a list of keywords. The metrics need to include both high-volume and specific keywords to generate the right quantity and quality of traffic to your site.
Semrush and Google’s Keyword Planner are both great tools to show you the metrics of specific keywords you’ve identified. This will help measure the words and phrases with metrics like high search volume, so you can put them to work boosting your SEO.
Picking only the terms with the most searches can be tempting, but keywords also need to be specific to your audience. Using just the word “veterinary” when building a site for a B2B veterinary diagnostic equipment manufacturer will generate a lot of traffic, but much of it will be people looking for a clinic for their pet, clinical research or other non-related products and services. The keywords “veterinary diagnostic equipment” may reach fewer people, but it will reach the right people, which, in this case, are veterinarians looking for equipment acquisitions.
Step 3: Develop an SEO Checklist
Each page of your site offers multiple opportunities to plug in those keyword terms. These words should be worked into the titles, section headers and other copy on the page, but they should also be written into the back end of the site.
Title tags, meta descriptions and alt tags are the page name, page overview and image descriptions, respectively, that you give to the search engine, so it knows what your site is all about. This language should follow SEO best practices, such as character limits and suggested structures, as the crawlers that rapidly search the web only know how to flag keywords, not interpret text.
Once your keywords have been identified, refined and strategically placed in both the front and back ends of the site, relevant site traffic and the number of quality leads should start to grow. However, these steps are just the tip of the SEO iceberg.