How to find the right keywords
Here are 3 simple ways to find good keywords for your site
- Write a list of what your website is about
- Look at what Google and other tools say about those words
- Steal keywords from your competitors
I will go in depth about each of them now.
Step One: Make a list
I’m going to use a single example throughout the rest of the article to make it easy to track the progress of a single website.
The business: Frank’s Plumbing and Heating
Location: Iowa City, Iowa
The first thing that Frank needs to do is a make a list of words that are relevant to what he does. It’s simply a list of nouns and verbs that relate to his business.
- Toilet
- Sink
- Plumbing
- Pipes
- Emergency service
- Leaks
- Installation
- Construction
- Sewer
- Shower
- Faucet
Those are all words that relate to Frank’s plumbing business. That’s not everything, but it’s a great start. Armed with his list, Frank is going to see what search engines have to say about what he does.
Use Ubersuggest for More Keywords
One thing that you can do now is to take your list to Ubersuggest. It’s a free tool that will take your main keywords and expand on them.
All you have to do is enter a keyword and Ubersuggest will show you a list of related keywords that you can try.
The Ubersuggest list can also be used to estimate how good your initial list was in terms of volume, CPC and competition. (Related: here are the highest paying Adsense keywords)
This list can be compared to the tool that’s next, Google’s Keyword Tool.
Step 2: Use Google Keyword Search and other Keyword Research tools
Since Google is the big dog, I will speak about Google most of the time. Everything you do for Google will work well for Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, and every other search engine. Google is used for nearly 68% of all internet searches.
Another important note is that only 15% of all searches are unique. That means that 85% of all searches are repeated. That’s why keywords work well, but at the same time exact-match keywords are not as useful as they used to be.
Google offers a great and free keyword search tool: its Keyword Planner.
If you are new to Adwords, you will need to open an account to use it.
Follow their instructions to set up an account. Don’t worry, you don’t have to spend money. You only need to promise to think about it.
The GIANT SECRET about SEO and rankings
Here’s the big secret. The one that’s at the heart of everything that Google is doing. This is worth millions of dollars in SEO work and data analysis. And it has to do with a very simple white hat SEO strategy.
The simple secret is to write great content.
That’s it.
When you write content that is valuable (like this post!), people will spend a lot of time reading it, people will organically share it and all of this will boost your site to the top.
What not to do (unless you want to piss off Google)
1. Doing Keyword Stuffing
The biggest no-no for Google with keywords is ‘keyword stuffing.’, which means simply putting your keywords as often as possible in your text.
From Google:
“Keyword stuffing” refers to the practice of loading a web page with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google search results. Often these keywords appear in a list or group, or out of context (not as natural prose). Filling pages with keywords or numbers results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site’s ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.
Examples of keyword stuffing include:
- Lists of phone numbers without substantial added value
- Blocks of text listing cities and states a webpage is trying to rank for
- Repeating the same words or phrases so often that it sounds unnatural, for example:
- We sell custom cigar humidors. Our custom cigar humidors are handmade. If you’re thinking of buying a custom cigar humidor, please contact our custom cigar humidor specialists at custom.cigar.humidors@example.com.”
Many, many websites, early on, used keyword stuffing to try to get Google’s attention. It worked, for about a year. Nonetheless, it’s not hard to look around today and still see websites with a bunch of keywords packed on a page.
One of the biggest examples is lists of the towns that you work in. If you’re a plumber, you might work in 20 towns and cities. Many web designers will put a huge list of all the towns at the bottom of the page. That’s not only not going to get you the results you need, it’s likely to make the Google bot mark your site down.
If you want to list the towns, create a nice, separate page for each town and list them on your site. Your developer can even make the pages invisible to people, but visible to Google.
Keyword stuffing isn’t a positive way to get Google’s attention. It is considered a very bad black-hat technique
2. Using Irrelevant Keywords
A plumber shouldn’t have a lot of references to football, the Super Bowl, Valentine’s day, and other things that have nothing to do with the business. The more focused and targeted your keywords, the better.
3. Picking Keywords That Have No Traffic
Don’t make the mistake of working on keywords that don’t get any traffic. Very often, people will go with their instincts. Do the research that I talked about above.
4. Placing All your Eggs in One Keyword
Making only one keyword the focus of your website is a huge mistake. So often people, especially ones who are specialists, will get too focused on a single keyword because they’re worried that they will get calls from people that want things that they don’t offer. It’s a good thing to say to people, “Sorry, I don’t do that, but let me refer to you to my friend,” rather than looking at a phone that never rings.
