How to Choose Keywords: SEO Keywords Explained
Far too often I receive clients that have attempted their own SEO (which by the way is awesome) but have used SEO keywords that are entirely too vague to actually be useful. Unfortunately, if you’re not using SEO keywords that are descriptive enough of your website’s topic, your desired audience is not going to find it in search engines. This is where SEO keyword planning tools become handy, like SEO keyword generators. In this article, I am going to discuss these tools and how to use them to choose keywords for SEO on your website that are better targeted towards your desired audience.
The Beginning: Choose a SEO Keyword that Summarizes Your Website’s Topic
The beginning is pretty simple: you’ll want to choose a SEO keyword that summarizes your website’s topic as accurately as possible. For example, if you have a blog about cooking, you may want your initial SEO keyword to be “cooking blog”. It is okay this isn’t too specific about the type of cooking blog you write – we will get to that later. For now, we just need an SEO keyword to get started with using as a search term later when we start using SEO keyword planning tools to narrow down our focus.
Next Up: Choose a Popular Search Phrase for Your Focus Keyword
Now we’re going to head over to Google Trends to select a focus keyword more specific. This is going to be the main SEO keyword we use the most on the website, instead of the keyword “cooking blog”. So go ahead and do a search for the keyword “cooking blog” here. You’ll see you get a list of related topics like cooking, blog, recipes, etc. You also get a list of related search queries. Use the topics to narrow down your focus, and the queries to select a more specific focus keyword. So let’s suppose my cooking blog is all about my favorite recipes. I’m going to click on the recipes’ topic in that case. Next, I’m going to start going through the list of related search terms to find something that clicks with what I write about. Ahh, here we go. Healthy recipes. I do only write about healthy recipes! So now I’ve got a new focus keyword – “healthy recipes blog”. See how much more specific than “cooking blog”?
Now: Let’s Choose SEO Keywords for Backup!
We still want to choose some more SEO keywords to cover the variety of other search terms readers may use to search for a blog like mine. So now let’s use a different tool to come up with some more SEO keywords – Ubersuggest. This SEO keyword planning tool suggests keywords that are related to whatever keyword you search for. So I’m going to type in “healthy recipes” and see what I come up with. Oh, wow. I never realized it before, but I do have the following themes to my blog:
- healthy recipes on a budget
- healthy recipes diet
- healthy recipes easy
So I put a checkmark next to these, and save the text to use later.
Make sure that you’re not using too many keywords. I highly recommend using no less than three keywords and no more than five keywords on a page. The reason for this is most search engines have a hard limit on how many keywords they will accept before they consider you to be “keyword stuffing” and will blacklist your website from appearing in their results at all. So be careful!
In Conclusion: The Best SEO Keywords are Targeted SEO Keywords
While it may seem somewhat counter-intuitive to limit your audience by making SEO keywords as specific as possible, in reality you are only making your website easier for your audience to find. With millions upon millions of websites out there, your audience needs more than ever to be specific when typing in search engine queries, and unfortunately they’re not going to find your website if you are not also using similar SEO keywords to help them find your website. So make sure that your SEO keywords are as targeted as possible so that your audience can easily find exactly what they’re looking for when they search for a website like yours, and you will be surprised at how much your search engine rankings and traffic improves.
New Client Special: Get a search engine optimized, professionally written article for only $5 and up!