All posts tagged keywords
Marrying Your Keyword Analysis with Website Content
courtesy Google
Is SEO copywriting stunting your creativity? Copywriters passionate about communicating the story behind their products must do so within the limits of the keyword analysis for their sites. They find themselves playing an alternative version of mad-libs – crafting sentences around two provided keywords that will increase traffic to their site based on search engine queries and top rankings.
The following are some challenges and recommendations on copywriting with keywords:
Use Keywords as an Opener to Your Product Description
If you’re working on the general website copy to describe your product or service, you will find that keywords often describe a general product category such as “sleeping bags for backpacking.” How would you spin this keyword if you were hoping to promote the launch of your first sleeping bag for backpacking? It’s a minor grammatical detail, and the lack of flexibility can be frustrating – you can’t pluralize a singular word (or vice versa in this case) to fit your sentence structure.
Here, your keyword should open your sentence or paragraph. Use it as an opportunity to educate your consumer base about the product category in general and to give them shopping tips before introducing your own product. For instance, “Sleeping bags for backpacking ought to be…” If you can spare the “real estate” for copy on your site, incorporating this general information then juxtaposing it with your product offerings and differentiators will make your brand stand out as an industry expert and resource – one that values customer service as much as sales.
Working Around Character and Word Limits
If you are working with limited characters and words (as is the case with GoogleAds), you need to weigh whether including the keyword is worth the space. If the ad is centered around a promotion or sale, the copy should prioritize that action item first – such as “Enter Promotion Code…” or “Free Shipping with…” For each campaign, work with your marketing team to develop a hierarchy of priorities of most important to least.
1. Promotion
2. Keyword
3. Product Offerings
3. Product Function
4. Brand
This list will vary from company to company – for instance, if your brand is well known then brand name within the ad should be prioritized higher on the list. Creating this guideline as a team will allow you become more focused in your limited copy length – and provide you with a template to test various permutations and measure results in your ad campaigns.
The Big Picture: Keyword Analysis as an Indicator of Overall Product Strategy
Now, don’t completely change your product line because the keywords do not fit 100% with what you have to offer. However, if you begin noticing a pattern in the keywords that deviate from your current strategy – it’s probably worth investigating. For instance, if you currently offer a line of battery-powered flashlights and you notice that search queries are leaning towards an eco-friendly rechargeable light, the trend might present a new opportunity in your product development.
Rather than viewing keyword analysis as a limitation for writers, marketers should use it as a tool. Copywriters will have to become masters of succinct messaging and manipulators of sentence structure to weave keywords into organic and compelling copy. More importantly, begin with a solid sense of your company’s product strategy, communicate this to your copywriters so that the keywords alone do not take command of your message.
Analytics Can Be the “Key” to Keywords
86400-1440-24-7-365. Google is on a hunt to help us find what we ask of it. All this high-powered engine needs is a few characters to produce results in what seems like nanoseconds. That’s all there is to it. Or is it? Don’t fall prey to the simplicity. It’s the keyword relevance that draws in the qualified traffic to your website. So, in order to lure this highly qualified traffic you need to develop a better understanding of keywords.
That’s where Analytics comes into play. There are a variety of free, subscription-based and pay-per-use keyword research tools available to help you find the right keywords. Google’s Keyword Tool, with its huge database of keywords in over 50 languages, is one such example. You can even enter a word or a phrase that describes your business/website right in Google to get a sense of traffic. But before you do even that, utilize your Google Analytics account. That means moving from the shallow waters of the Analytics dashboard and taking a deeper dive into the Analytics data in order to conduct the appropriate research.
Google Analytics allows us to see the data in a nice context. It’s almost like giving us the answers to a test. An entire “keywords” section is devoted to providing the keywords people used to find our website, how many visits from the keyword, how much revenue that keyword generated, the bounce rate and much more! This is very informative data to have before you start investing time and effort into organic and paid search.
This table allows us to see which keywords are performing well and which ones are not when it comes to the critical metrics such as the number of visits, time on site and bounce rate.
Analytics allows us to focus closer on a particular metric, in this case bounce rate compared to the website’s average.
Remember, we want to lure qualified traffic to the site. SEO experts follow a basic thumb rule for choosing keywords that bring the most relevant, revenue-adding traffic to a website. Here are a few considerations:
- Say no to single words. Phrases or long tail keywords are better than singular words.
- Target highly searched terms that have as little competition as possible. However, do not use keywords that have less competition just for this reason alone.
- Choose keywords that are specific with a narrow focus but avoid getting too specific so as to not lose traffic.
- Localize your keywords by making use of your geographical location.
- Use at least 2-3 different, but related, keywords on each of the pages of your web site (too many keywords on a web page will saturate your efforts).
Remember, you will want to get the most of out of your keywords when you begin to optimize. That means including them in obvious places on your web page (title tag, meta tags, copy) and not so obvious places (alt tags, anchor text) in order to achieve high keyword density, frequency and prominence.
Without having a good place to start for choosing keywords, the task can quickly become mind boggling given there can be literally millions of keywords to choose from. Besides, choosing the wrong keywords can be disastrous and set you back months if you are optimizing your site for organic search. For that reason alone is worth the time and research using Analytics.
Simple SEO Tips for Bloggers
A lot of my clients know that blogging about their products and services is an important part of marketing in today’s social media crazed cyber world. Yet, they are not quite sure how it will help them with their search rankings. Regardless of what platform you use (Blogger, Drupal, WordPress, etc.) make sure you follow these best practices for blogging as they will assist with your SEO efforts.
* Identify a few targeted keywords that you want to be ranked and found by the search engines. These keywords will need to be the most common words used in your blog post and make sure they are in the title, URL, used in outbound links and are bolded.
* Change your permalink (i.e. permanent URL) structure to show the title of your blog post rather than the default URL (ex. “yourblog.com/?p=123″). This will make it easy for search engine spiders to find and crawl blog content.
* Write the title of your blog as a headline in order to grab the reader’s attention but also include targeted keywords because your blog will get archived and your titles can become searchable.
* Categorize your content so it allows the aggregation of content according to themes, thus making it easier for search engines to understand your content and giving you a better chance of ranking well on particular topics.
* Keep the content fresh in order to keep the readers and search engines coming back. From a search engine perspective, if your blog is updated frequently, it will attract the attention of spiders and causes more crawling and faster indexing, thus allowing your new content to become searchable more quickly.
* Create internal links by deep linking anchor text to product and/or information pages on interior pages of the site.
* Encourage interaction through comments. This will help create a more active community, which will translate in more content, traffic and eventually higher rankings.
Getting the Most Out of Keywords
Targeting the right keywords is arguably the most important part of any SEO methodology. What to do with or, better yet, how to optimize for those keywords is “1B” in terms of importance. Below are helpful recommendations to consider when optimizing for your targeted keywords.
- Forget about and remove long keyword lists and/or “stuffed” keywords from your web pages. Search engines consider keyword stuffing spam. Meta keyword tags with dozens of keywords will not work either. Search engines do not consider this meta tag in ranking calculations and it’s never seen by visitors or searchers.
- Optimize a web page for 1-2 keywords or keyword phrases so that you build more relevancy between the copy and the keyword versus many keywords assigned to one page.It is much easier to get high rankings if the web page is very relevant to the searched keyword.
- If you have multiple-pages targeting the same keywords, avoid cannibalization by placing links on all the secondary pages back to the page you most want ranking for the term/phrase using the primary keywords as the anchor text of those links.
- Add keyword modifiers and combine keyword variations in one sentence. For example, an optimized web page title for a San Francisco shoe store could read: Buy cool Puma sneakers in our sneakers shop in San Francisco.
- Don’t be afraid to use your targeted keywords in the URLs of your web pages. Search engines do look at keyword-targeted domains. But don’t obsess with the order of the words or go overboard by using too many keywords in the same URL.
