Whatever type of business you run you need an online presence. How visible your website is online – and how it achieves that visibility – depends on the type of business and, naturally, budget. Small consultancies might gain most of their clients via referrals and networking so might only need a website that serves as a “brochure” providing more details to potential clients that already know the business. But for businesses that want to grow and expand their reach well beyond people who already know the company then a much more focused effort needs to be applied to online visibility and reviewing keywords is one of them.
Two ways to increase online visibility are a pay-per-click advertising campaign or an SEO (search engine optimisation) campaign.
Some businesses opt for just one of these campaigns – others for both. Our experience shows that an SEO campaign delivers a better ROI than a PPC campaign, but PPC can be helpful for startups or to market new products. Either way, at the heart of any type of search strategy are the keywords.
You need to carefully select the keywords you are going to target if they are to increase revenue and not simply drive additional traffic to a website. This is not a fleeting task either. It is one that requires time and effort to discover which keywords your target user base is actually searching for – and reviewing keywords periodically to refine your selections as more data becomes available to help make better decisions.
Reviewing and refining your keyword strategy can reveal new opportunities and help increase conversion rates. So, let’s take a look at how you can do this.
What factors matter when reviewing keywords
There are a number of different factors that influence whether or not we should target a specific keyword.
For example, this can include:
- How difficult it is to rank for a keyword
- Search intent
- Search volume
These are three of the main factors marketing professionals tend to consider. You will need to use a search engine tool to help you to understand elements like keyword difficulty. Ahrefs, SEMRush, SEO PowerSuite and Majestic SEO are some the best SEO tools on the market today, so you may want to look into using them.
To organise your keywords based on the factors mentioned above, we would recommend using a spreadsheet where you can enter all of your keywords and the data regarding the evaluation factors mentioned above. You can then organise your keywords based on this so that you can understand which keywords are a priority for your business.
For example, you may want to give your keywords a difficulty score out of 100, with 100 indicating the highest difficulty. You can then organise the keywords from 0 to 100, which will help you to understand which keywords are going to be the easiest for you to target.
Identify keywords that are out of reach at the moment
A lot of marketers and business owners focus on keywords that are not within their reach, and wonder why they are not achieving the results they had hoped for. This is often because they are trying to compete with websites that are far more mature in terms of optimisation for search engines.
When you are trying to rank for a specific keyword, you should do a search to see which websites occupy the top ten places on Google. Check out their domain rating in one of the SEO tools mentioned earlier – or even simpler, install the Chrome MozBar to view Moz’s standard authority measure DA (Domain Authority). If the Top 10 websites have much higher ratings than yours then it will require time and effort to challenge those competitors.
You won’t be able to beat these websites in the rankings… yet! This is not to say that you won’t be able to in the future but it can take time. However, you do need to work on building the authority of your website. So, it makes sense to compete on a more realistic level now, finding keywords where the competition is less and websites with lower domain rankings occupy the top spots.
Nevertheless, do make sure that you put together a list of these keywords so that you can revisit them in the future once you have improved visibility for the less competitive keywords.
What are people searching for? What do they want to know?
Next, you need to make sure that you understand what your target consumer base is searching for online. Luckily, Google has made it easy for us to find this information.
You can use the People Also Ask section and the Related Search section of the search listings to find out what else people have been looking for on Google.
This gives you great insight into alternative keywords that you can use to enrich your strategy. If that was not enough, it can also help to direct your content marketing ideas. You will understand the sort of topics that people are interested in, so you can tailor your blog posts and other pieces of content effectively.
Add long-tail keywords into your SEO strategy
Another important step is to add long-tail keywords to your SEO efforts. This is imperative because around 70 per cent of searches made on Google today consist of long-tail keywords.
There are great benefits associated with long-tail keywords including the following:
- Long-tail keywords tend to be easier to rank for because competition is typically lower
- Long-tail keywords make it easier to craft specific content that relates directly to the query
- Long-tail keywords speak directly to customers’ specific queries, ensuring that relevancy is high
When you take all of this into account, it is not hard to see why long-tail keywords are a must. But where can you conduct your research and find the best long-tail keywords?
Here are some of our recommendations:
- Use different keyword research tools
- Use Google’s related search section
- Mine your analytics data
- Visit question and answer websites for inspiration
- Mine search query reports
If you use the approaches mentioned above, you should be able to come up with a great selection of long-tail keywords that can help you to reach people from your target user base.
Final words on reviewing keywords
We hope that this brief guide has given you a better understanding of the different approaches you can take to refine your keyword strategy so that you can achieve better results. If you follow the steps above, you will improve your SEO efforts online.
How often would you recommend reviewing target keywords. Ours have been the same since 2019 but visits are dropping.
Our business wasnt impacted by the pandemic (fortunately) so we don’t think this is the problem. It seems like trends might have changed
Hi Al,
How often you review target keywords depends on the industry you are in but as an absolute minimum they should be reviewed every year. For some of our clients in fast-paced industries we are reviewing them every month so if you are still using keywords from 2019 you will almost certainly find that search trends have changed since then.
Take a look at what you competitors are doing and don’t forget to check Google Search Console.