Every time you talk about Search Engine Optimisation the term “keywords” is always present in the conversation. It is an important aspect of SEO and many SEO Specialist and SEO Managers still debate on exactly how important exactly are the keywords are and how they affect driving traffic and improve the ranking of your webpage.
What are Keywords?
To know the importance of keywords we must understand what they mean for your website and potential customers. From your customer’s perspective, the keywords are the words or phrases the customer uses to make a search query in the search engine. Search Queries can be as simple as finding out the best computer, the top 10 best computer games or as complex as solving engineering problems.
From the perspective of the website owner the keywords define your content. They give you an idea of what your potential customers are searching for, how often, and how many of them are searching for the same thing. The keywords can also give you important insights into the trend of your customer’s behaviour trends that can help you create a marketing strategy to help better capture your customer’s demand through their searches and queries. The keywords also help you determine the type and subject of your content to publish on your website or blog.
Keywords and Your Target Audience
As discussed in the previous section of the Article, the Keywords can define the type of content you publish but Keywords can also help you target the type of customers you want to visit in your website.
A keyword has a number of properties or metrics that determine its potential usefulness like Keyword Search Volume and Keyword Difficulty. The Keyword Search Volume shows the number of searches of a given keyword within a specified time range. The Keyword Difficulty is a rating on how many websites that are using the keyword for their content, this means that the more difficult the keyword the harder it is to make it to the first page of the search results. The Keyword Search Volume and Keyword Difficulty can be loosely defined as the supply and demand of content.
Keywords and Your Target Audience – continued
So how do the Keyword and its search volume and difficulty allow you to target your customers? The metrics can help you determine the trends of searches and queries and it can also allow you to create specific content that is targeted to a specific group of users or a Niche Market.
Let’s have a scenario on how keywords determine your audience. The keyword “Top 10 Games” is a broad keyword with a high search volume and high keyword difficulty, meaning that there a plenty of people using the word to search for games. The audience could be parents looking for games to play for their toddlers, A team leader looking for games to play on the company outing or a Gamer looking for games to play over the summer.
Changing your keyword to “Top 10 Games for PC” allows you to target a specific group of people who are looking for Games for their Computer. This allows you to create content that can target that keyword to capture the audience. Focusing your keyword to “Top 10 Action Games for PC” allows you to target a specific niche in your target audience.
Long-Tail Keywords
Keywords can target a broad audience or target a specific niche in your audience. It all depends on the keywords. Keywords that attract a broad subject may attract a large number of an audience but it is difficult to rank against a large number of other websites. Keywords that are specific to a subject may be not be as difficult to rank but they also attracts a considerably lower amount of traffic, these keywords are Long-tail keywords. Long tail keywords usually have more than three words.
Long-Tail Keywords attract what the industry calls, a High-Quality Visitor because they know what they are looking for and therefore a higher click-through rate or a bigger chance of conversion to sales. Most websites and blogs strategise on Long-Tail keywords by publishing a number of articles that target a specific audience. The combined number of audience visiting the web pages with long-tail keywords can potentially outrank the number of audiences attracted by a broad keyword and at the same time attracting good quality visitors.
Short-Tail Keywords
Short tail keywords usually contain less than three words and often connotes to a broad topic that generates high volume searches but has a high keyword difficulty.
Keywords and Your Content
Keywords can define your content but it should not necessarily dictate the direction of your content and subject. Just conjuring up any keyword and stuffing it on your web page can have more negative effects as Google highly discourages keyword stuffing. There are some fundamental rules on the usage of keywords for it to be effective in your webpage.
The keywords inform the bots, like Google bots the information on your webpage at the same time they should also look natural to your audience without looking out of context. The target keywords should be included in Title Tag and the body of the content.
The target keyword should be present in the webpage URL, the H1 tag of the web page, the meta description of the page, and the alt description or attributes of the images that are present on the pages to further help the crawlers and bots determine the content of the webpage at the same time inform the audience of the overview of the content of the webpage even without reading the pages.
Final Words
The keyword is a double-edged weapon that can either help improve traffic with quality visitors, increase conversion and click-through rates or increase your bounce rates and customer abandonment. The importance of keywords varies every year because of the rapidly evolving algorithms of the Search Engine. In 2012, Search Engines needed websites to specify meta keywords and now in 2017, the search engine auto-detects the keywords through the content of the webpage.
Keywords define your content but should not dictate your subject. The quality of the content should not suffer for the purpose of including the keyword in the body but should complement it. For more help with SEO visit Search Engine Optimisation Wirral.
If you need help with your keywords then check us out SEO Wirral.