Unleashing SEO_ Mastering the Power of Keywords - Woman thinking of using keywords

Mastering SEO: unleashing the power of highly optimized keywords 

Keywords are the doorway to many things. For a start, when you uncover the right keywords they tell you exactly what your target market is thinking about in the words they use to think about those things. 

Secondly, when you start all your content development with a clear understanding of the keywords you are trying to rank for, it makes your content great for your target market AND for search engines.

Everybody wins.

Only as long as you don’t stuff your articles with too many of them.

The challenge I see many people facing is trying to optimize content when they have no idea what keywords their target market is using. 

So when you’re planning your SEO campaign, start by identifying the exact keywords that your target market is using when looking for solutions to the problems that you provide an answer for. Everything else after that is pretty straightforward.

The challenge I see many people facing is trying to optimize content when they have no idea what keywords their target market is using. 

What’s a keyword

Let’s define this word so that we are on the same page. 

In the context of digital marketing and search engine optimization (SEO), a keyword is a word or phrase that users enter into a search engine to find specific information.

Why keywords are critical for business success

Keywords are central to the way your potential clients interact with search engines.

For example, if you were looking for a place to buy a bouquet of yellow roses for a friend, you might type “florists who stock yellow roses” into a search engine. In this case, “florists who stock yellow roses” is the keyword.

Let’s make this real with an example. I’ll use a florist near us here in Western Massachusetts, Nuttleman’s Florist & Greenhouse of Northampton MA. 

Of yellow roses and keywords...

If you live a few blocks away from Nuttleman’s and say they do stock yellow roses but make no mention of this anywhere on their website, they would not show up on the search engine results page for that search. 

At least not as high on the page as a florist that may be further away, maybe even two whole towns away, in Amherst MA, that makes lots of mentions of yellow roses on their website. 

This may not matter at all for Nuttleman’s if you were the only person in Northampton that ever typed in “florists who stock yellow roses” in a Google search. 

If you read only up to this point in this blog post and remember only the few paragraphs above, you have the core formula for SEO success… 

But what if there were tens or hundreds of people every day doing this? What if there were people in other towns close by doing the same search and only seeing results from florists further off? 

All of a sudden those five words have a LOT of value for Nuttleman’s but there is no way they will ever know it until they do their keyword research. And once they know it they would be nuts to ignore it.

If you read only up to this point in this blog post and remember only the few paragraphs above, you have the core formula for SEO success: 

The Right Keyword x Optimization = Traffic

Understanding the keywords that are relevant to your business and the products or services you offer is crucial. 

This can help you optimize your website and content to align with these keywords, increasing the likelihood that your website appears in search engine results when potential customers use those keywords.

Unleashing SEO_ Mastering the Power of Keywords - This Digital Marketing Specialist has a point to make about keywords

The power of long tail keywords

Most high-value keywords are single words or short phrases. E.g. “digital marketing,” or “yellow roses.”

Trying to rank for these keywords is hard as there are usually a ton of other websites trying to rank for them. 

So how do we get around this?

Enter “long-tail” keywords.

These are longer, more specific keyword phrases that visitors are more likely to use when they’re closer to the point of purchase or when they’re using voice search. 

For instance, “digital marketing for a startup florist Northampton MA” is a long-tail keyword.

“Florists in Northampton MA yellow roses for Mother’s Day” is a long-tail keyword.

Long-tail keywords may not drive as much traffic as more competitive keywords, but if you chose the right ones they will drive more than enough traffic to your website. 

Long-tail keywords may not drive as much traffic as more competitive keywords, but if you chose the right ones they will drive more than enough traffic to your website. 

For example, “digital marketing” might send 50,000 visitors to the top-ranking website on Google each month, and “digital marketing for creative entrepreneurs in Western MA” might only send 50 visitors to the Artist Dynamix website. If only 3 of those become clients, that is more than enough work done by that one keyword.

As you can see from the Mother’s day keyword example, keywords are not permanent. They change due to trends and seasons. A well-structured SEO campaign factors this in and plans content accordingly. 

How to carry out keyword research

As you’ve seen, keywords are the foundation of SEO. Keyword research is an important part of SEO and involves identifying popular words and phrases people enter into search engines. 

The aim is to figure out what to rank for. Tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, AdX SEO Actionz, SEMrush, and Ahrefs can help businesses find keywords relevant to their industry and audience.

Here are some of our favorite tools and strategies for finding keywords.

The Jack Checker

The Jack Checker

A good place to start is to find out what keywords your site already ranks for and to compare it to the keywords that your competitors are ranking for. 

Our favorite tool for this is, off course 😉, The Jack Checker. 

This tool also gives you information on how fast your website is, what technical issues you need to fix, and how to fix them.

jackchecker.site

UberSuggest

Ubersuggest homepage

UberSuggest is a popular SEO and keyword research tool developed by digital marketing expert Neil Patel. It provides a range of features that can help users improve their website’s SEO performance, find keyword ideas, and gain insights into their competition.

UberSuggest provides keyword ideas based on a seed keyword. It provides information such as search volume, SEO difficulty, paid difficulty, and cost per click (CPC). It also offers a list of keyword suggestions, questions, prepositions, and comparisons related to your seed keyword.

ubersuggest.com 

Diib

Diib homepage

One of my favorite features about Diib is how you can do a keyword gap analysis between your website and several others in the same niche. 

A gap analysis enables you to see which keywords you are not ranking for and your competitors are, or vice versa. This helps you understand your competitor’s strategy and plan your content better. 

There are several tools that offer this functionality, but the main difference is that Diib makes it available for FREE.

Diib also allows you to enter any URL and immediately get a lot of SEO information about that website; domain authority, keywords, backlinks, etc.

diib.com

KWFinder

KWfinder homepage

I love KWFinder. It’s one of those tools which feels like it should be absolutely illegal (Maybe all of these tools feel like that in some way). 

KWFinder helps you find long-tail keywords with low SEO difficulty super easily. You put in your main keyword and it spits out rows and rows of related keywords.

It provides data on search volume, keyword difficulty score, CPC, and PPC. It also shows you which websites rank for each keyword in a useful SERP (Search Engine Results Page) analysis table.

Remember we spoke about trends above? KWFinder provides a historical view of keyword search volumes over the past 12 months. Boom! Yellow roses! We’re coming to get you.

kwfinder.com

SpyFu

Spyfu homepage

SpyFu is my go-to app for quick competitor analysis. Enter a domain and it spits out keywords that it ranks for, competitors for that domain, AND a list of all the keywords associated with PPC ads that have been run for that website. 

So you can quickly see if your competitors are spending money to get seen for a particular keyword [*Insert sneaky little laugh here*] 

spyfu.com

Answer The Public

Answer the public homepage

The name of this tool speaks to the heart of what SEO is about. Answer the freakin’ public. Don’t go off on a tangent writing content that no one is interested in. Answer. The. Public. 

And how do you do that? By finding out what questions the public is asking. 

I know no better tool for drilling down to the specific permutations of questions around a particular keyword than this website. AnswerThePublic.com is happy, wagging long-tail heaven. 

answerthepublic.com

 

The right SEO strategies will get you better rankings.

A guided SEO journey

As part of our own quest to get our SEO right, we’ve embarked on an exciting 180-day journey to get our site to rank for relevant keywords. 

Artist Dynamix is a relatively new kid on the block when it comes to digital agencies in Western Massachusetts. Our work is cut out for us because the giants, they be ranking for everything, including the latte you had this morning. 

But we’re here and we’re diving in. If you’re a creative entrepreneur or entrepreneur of any kind, join us on our #180Days Ultimate SEO Makeover journey. 

We’ll take you behind the scenes of our very own digital marketing agency as we work on our own SEO, step by step. Together, we’ll learn, grow, and optimize our way to success.

Interested in learning how to optimize your own website? Find out how by clicking this link.

Editor

Fungai 'Your Web Guy' is a writer, web developer, and creative entrepreneur. He is the founder of Artist Dynamix and is passionate about helping businesses and creatives use digital marketing tools to take off and fly. When you see him put his hand up, he is reaching for the sky.