If you are any kind of entrepreneur, or a grizzled professional veteran looking to keep up with modern technology and online society, then you definitely know by now that search rankings are your lifeline. After all, if people do not discover that you exist, they will not come looking for you – and we all know that, most of the time, nobody looks past the first half of the first page of search results.
So you want to do your search signals right. You want to be what pops up when people browse. Unfortunately, business SEO is somewhat different from casual blogs and social influencers. We talked to a friend from New York SEO Alpha Clicks, and got some nifty advice on the keyword research process. Check it out!
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Brainstorm a starting list
Try and see your product or service from the perspective of a potential customer. How would you, as a consumer, go about looking for this thing? When you adopt the perspective of your target audience, it becomes fairly easy to come up with the terms they might go browsing for.
This first round of research is fairly easy to do. Simply pull it out from thin air. It should not be all that hard to make an intelligent guess. Consider the Five W’s: Who is searching? What are they searching for? Why? Where from? When do they need it? If you can answer these questions, you will be well on the way to get the information you need.
Run your list through a research tool
Once you have completed your initial brainstorming phase, you will probably have your hands full of a big jumble of loosely related phrases and words. Now, the next step in the research process is to streamline that mess into comprehensive and relevant data.
For this, third party software comes into play. You will need to get a keyword research tool and use it as a sieve for what you came up with. These tools can help you determine how well your brainstormed items correspond to actual search results, and what specific phrases make for good combinations. You can find an in-depth look into how this software works in this informative article.
Use tailored suggestions to trim it down
This is a step further in refining your search phrases. A large number of tools meant for keyword research also include a feature for suggestions. Think of it kind of as a cousin of predictive typing. It offers deeper insight into how actual living internet users change the keywords you came up with in their real-time browsing.
These changes mostly come down to rearranging word order, adding or removing words, or replacing something with a synonym. However, there is a pitfall here that you need to look out for. It might happen that the “refined list” you end up with will be strictly related to your content. Why is this a bad thing? Because you want people to find your service, not the text on your website.
For example, you may run a blog as a side thing for your business. Maybe that blog could feature interesting news, hacks, and so on to get people’s attention and keep things fresh and upbeat. But not all of those blog posts will have a link to your store plugged in them, right? This is why keywords have to center on your products, not on third-party stuff, even if you exclusively share niche-only content.
Make the most out of long tails
Long tail keywords are not something that many tutorials will advise you to focus on. However, apparently, if you listen to that advice and disregard them, you are seriously cutting your options. The reason why long tails are typically disregarded is that not many people use them. How often do you google huge phrases or whole sentences, right? But, some people do search like that.
As a rule, these people are looking for a solution to a very specific problem. Therefore, they make their queries extremely specific too. If you can predict what these specific long phrases will be, you can include them in your content. This allows for insanely accurate visitor targeting. You can find a great guide on this type of search query at this web page: https://backlinko.com/long-tail-keywords
Be very cautious with broad search terms
Broad search terms are the most generic words that any internet user can ever type into their browser’s input bar. This is stuff like “seafood soup” or “Christmas decor” or whatever. Now, such broad searches are not always bad. They make great starting points. The trouble with focusing on them in your SEO campaigns is that you will end up in a hell storm of competition.
An even bigger problem is traffic that does not convert. Generic keywords will attract a lot of visitors to your site who will not want to do business. Maybe they clicked out of curiosity, or searched for something slightly similar, but whatever the case they will not bring in any profit for you. Frankly, the only kind of company that can get any use out of broad searches is one that serves customers on a global scale.
If you are targeting a specific city, state, or region, rely on localized keywords instead. Include the name of your business territory in your search vocabulary. For example, “seafood soup menu New York” or “Christmas decor shops Boston” will greatly improve your targeting trends.
