Choosing Keywords And Phrases For Your Website

Considerations:

• Do not change your keywords and phrases more frequently than 4-6 months if you can help it. Google likes consistency and changing these items too quickly will result in you not ranking for anything. If you make changes, make a few and see what the outcome is over a few months (I suggest a minimum of 3) before making more changes. The only exception to this is if you are changing direction in your business or are discontinuing a dominant service.
• Ditch the “I must appear on the first page of Google” mentality. It is almost impossible to achieve unless you are in a super tight niche that has little or no competition. Instead you should be focusing on keywords and phrases that are applicable to your client base. Growing your online presence isn’t going to be a result of keywords only. Other factors come into play.
• Ask your clients. So many of my clients forget that their website is about their target market, not themselves. Ask existing clients what they would search for to find you. You might be very surprised to find the terms they would use.
• Remember YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DO so terms you use aren’t necessarily terms that the general public would use or even know.  Move away from your expertise for a time and think about what the general public might consider it is that you do.
• Keywords “per se” are no longer used for any search engine. What they do look for is words and phrases that are used consistently across your website. From terms you use for the content of your website through to terms that are used in our behind the scenes actions.
• Keywords must be 100% relevant to your website and its content. You can’t for example add in a keyword that is trending just to try to attract traffic. Google is smarter than that.
  

There is so much more to SEO than just keywords and even keyword research can be a very daunting task. Here are my recommendations for getting started with your keyword and phrase research.

The first thing you need to know is where these keywords can and are used. While you probably won’t do more than 20% of this yourself, I always believe that the more you know the more you can grow (cheesy I know but it works).

Google is looking for the use of and repetition of the keywords you select (and by keywords I mean words and phrases) throughout your website. These basic items are where your keywords should be used.

NB: I’m not placing these items in any order of significance and to be honest, the significance per item is very hard to actually calculate. Just consider that they all play a part in reinforcing your keyword strategy.

• Page URL - when you create a new page, make the page URL to be a concise description of your page. IE: A blog post about bathroom fittings might have the URL “bathroom-taps-you-will-love”. Try to do this BEFORE you publish the page or blog post. Once it is published if there is any chance someone has seen or bookmarked it, you will have to do a page redirect when you change the url.
• Meta Description - this is a behind the page short description of what your page is about. This is also what appears in search results. While it's important to use your keywords here, you also have to remember that this is your one chance to encourage visitors to click through so write for them. The black text in the image below is the meta description for this search result.

• Page Title - this is what appears at the top of your browser window or tab and while most clients won’t notice it, again it matters to SEO. Typically we use the structure “keyword | business name | secondary keyword” here.
• H1 tag - your H1 tag is the first and main heading on each web page. You should only ever have one H1 tag per page and this is where you should use at least one of your keywords or phrases.
• Your page text content, especially the first few paragraphs. You should use your keywords in these first few paragraphs, but above all the paragraph needs to be written for your client. Trying to go crazy with keywords won’t work and your clients won’t stay either so choosing keywords that have real meaning is where this kicks in.
• Image names - there is some debate as to whether this is still a factor however it can’t hurt so make sure your images are named appropriately. IE: don’t upload an image that is “IMG045886.jpg”, rename it to be “ThisImageKeyword.jpg” before you upload it.
• Image alt tags - ALT tags are for screen readers. A screen reader is for a visually impaired user and typically you should have ALT tags on all your images. Describe the image concisely. While this is a good place to use keywords, again Google is smarter than you think. Accessibility is a high priority so they will show their clients a page that is the most relevant and doesn’t stuff keywords into ALT tags. Use them to describe the image but remember you are describing the image for someone who can’t see it. That must be your priority.

Before you establish your primary and secondary keywords, don't forget to take into account your ideal client. If you supply a service primarily for children, consider what age range that might be. If you supply a service for women, make sure you take that into consideration with your keyword selection.

If you are a local business, consider using your location as one of your keywords. An organic cafe on the gold coast might use Gold Coast, but “Broadbeach” or “Mermaid Beach” is probably a better location term. If you are Laser Tag for example, “Gold Coast” is probably a better use of a location term as your market is probably going to be a high level of tourists who won’t know specific locations as well.

Think of keywords like this:

Your entire website has a theme, subject matter and keywords that will reflect what you are about. It is REALLY hard to be specific with keywords on your homepage so don’t beat yourself up about this page. This will always have more generic keywords than any other page on your website. That’s OK.

Now, think of every other page on your website as a landing page.  This is where you can get quite specific with both your keywords and content. If you offer 5 different legal services the keywords across these pages might be quite different.

You don’t  have to use exactly the same keywords across your website and you shouldn’t.

Google is smart enough to know that “sickness and accident” & “life insurance” both relate to the same subject so if you have an insurance website, don’t feel like you have to use the same keywords on different pages. Each of those pages is a chance to get clients that specifically relate to that subject. Keep that in mind.

Google presents a web page to their clients in response to their search queries, NOT an entire website. If someone searches for a red car, they don’t look at all websites that have something about a red car, look at all the pages and average it out. They show the client the web page that is most relevant for their search for a “red car”. Of course domain authority and lots of other factors kick in here, but the idea is that they show their client the most relevant web page NOT website.