Today, paid search campaigns can cost a significant amount of money! Since thousands of businesses are competing to get hungry buyers to click on their advertisements.
For a new business, it is often impossible to implement paid advertising campaigns with high enough bids to get the right people to click. This may lead to a low conversion rate. Thus causing the business to lose money instead of making money through the campaign.
While paid advertising is considered a useful option for startup companies to get more exposure for their brand, it is important not to forget that there are other options that can also be utilized to improve a brand’s exposure, obtain high-quality “hungry” traffic, and boost a company’s sales – often at a much lower cost than paid advertising.
To improve Google rank is one of the most effective methods for driving quality traffic back to a company’s website – traffic that is searching for terms related to the specific products and services offered by the brand. With the right type of SEO strategy in place, and the right techniques being executed, a brand can successfully dominate appropriate keywords in their niche, achieve first-page rankings on Google, and reap the benefits and awards that search engine optimization has to offer.
Unfortunately, many brands spend a lot of money on SEO campaigns without achieving any significant results. This can be quite disappointing when the brand learns that they have lost the money spent on SEO, which could have gone to a more appropriate type of advertising strategy. One of the most common problems faced by companies today is that they are not targeting the best keywords in their SEO campaigns. Even when following the best SEO tips there are to find, when the right keywords are not targeted, an SEO campaign is not likely to be successful.
8 Tips To Help You Choose The Right Keywords For your SEO campaign
Targeting the right keyword in your SEO campaign is almost more important than the actual strategies you implement in your campaign. With the right keywords targeted in your campaign, you have an opportunity to drive traffic back to your website that is ready to click the “sign up” or “buy now” button. Inappropriate or unworthy keywords, however, leads to generic traffic being driven back to your website, which you may not even be able to convert to contacts or subscribers.
Below, you will find eight of the most effective tips we have compiled into one single list to help you understand how you can choose the right keywords to target, providing you a higher chance of hitting that number one spot and allowing you to make the most out of the rankings you do achieve.
1. Know Who You Are Targeting
The first step to identifying and choosing the right keywords for your SEO campaign lies within understanding your target audience. To truly understand your audience, you first need to identify who your ideal customer (or website visitor) is. Without this basic knowledge, you won’t be able to implement the right keyword research strategies to help you find those perfect keywords to target.
There are numerous ways you can research your target audience. If you already have some customers on your database, then look at their data – consider the age range, gender, occupations, hobbies, interests, and any other data you can collect. You should also consider doing some research on the target audience of your competition.
Take a look at the products and services you offer, then ask yourself who the ideal customer is. If you are selling weight loss pills, for example, your ideal customer would be overweight individuals – those people who are already at a healthy weight would not be interested in your product.
2. Learn What Your Target Audience Is Asking
Once you have identified who your ideal target audience is, the next step is to determine the questions they are asking in relation to the products or services you have to offer them. With voice search becoming more popular, especially with devices such as the Amazon Echo and, of course, the Siri virtual assistance built into Apple devices, businesses are becoming more aware of the fact that they need to take voice search into account.
Targeting keywords related to questions should be an essential part of your keyword research campaign. Try to target question keywords that start with “how to”, “learn to”, “what are” and “how much”. You will, of course, have to answer these questions on the pages you are using to target them.
3. Identify What Keywords Your Competitors Are Targeting
Competitor research needs to be at the top of your internet marketing strategy, regardless of the techniques you are planning to execute. When you are only starting out, there will obviously be more successful brands in your industry – by looking at what they are doing to be so successful, you can learn quite a lot.
Competitor research becomes important even with a keyword research campaign – by using certain online tools, you can see which keywords your competitors are targeting. This will help you obtain more keywords to analyze, giving you an opportunity to discover particular keywords you can target.
4. Avoid Becoming Part Of The Cliché
While it is a good idea to look at what keywords your competitors are targeting to help you discover new ideas for keywords you can target in your SEO strategy, it is important that you avoid becoming part of a “cliché”. What we mean by this is – avoid targeting that specific set of keywords every single company in your industry is targeting.
If you are selling weight loss pills, for example, everyone in search of your products will enter “weight loss” or “losing weight” into Google at some point – but there are already companies paying thousands of dollars to rank on the first page for these keywords.
Rather target keywords that are more specific, has a lower level of competition, and a better chance of giving you an opportunity to present your brand’s website on the first page of Google.
5. Don’t Overlook The Potential Of Long-Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords have become a particularly popular trend in modern-day SEO campaigns, with many internet marketers discovering the potential that these keywords have to offer their website. Long-tail keywords are usually easy to find, and they are more niche-relevant and specific to the particular products or services you offer, than generic keywords.
There are many benefits to using long-tail keywords. You can rank easier for such a keyword as compared to a generic keyword, and since they are more specific to your brand’s offerings, they also usually yield better conversion rates. A person searching for “best weight loss pills for men” are more likely to buy your product developed specifically to help men lose weight and build muscle, than a person searching for “lose weight”.
6. Avoid Being Too Confident In Untargeted Keywords
Every now and then, you will come across a keyword with an extremely low competition rating, and you will notice that almost none of your competitors are targeting that particular keyword. The first thought on your mind would be that you have discovered a goldmine – an opportunity to outrank your competition.
While some of these untargeted keywords can give you an excellent opportunity to rank for an undiscovered keyword, you should ensure you do not become too confident in every single untargeted keyword you discover.
Think about the fact that your competitors might have discovered the keyword – and decided not to target it for a reason. Do your research well before you decide to spend too much time and effort on such a keyword.
7. Avoid Relying On Scrapers
Keyword scrapers are becoming less popular in modern times, yet many businesses and internet marketers are still relying on them to help them find keywords and build backlinks. Keyword scrapers work by taking a particular keyword you provide, and then the keyword scraper would conduct multiple searches and collect thousands of potential keywords you can target.
While some of the keyword provided by the keyword scraper may provide you with an excellent opportunity, the fact that thousands of keywords are returned and only a few would be useful can cause a lot of time to be wasted – time that could be spent on a more effective keyword research strategy.
8. Use The Right Keyword Research And SEO Tools
Finally, we would like to stress just how important it is to ensure you use the right tools to conduct your keyword research. Since keywords play such a significant role in the success rate of your SEO campaigns and to improve Google rank, you should look at certain premium SEO and keyword research tools as an investment, rather than as an expense. SEMRush is one of the most popular choices on the internet at the moment. The Moz collection of Keyword Research tools are also noteworthy. Another useful tool would be the keyword tool from WordStream.
Conclusion
SEO is a complex process that involves choosing the right keywords and implementing the best SEO tips to help your website move up the ranks (and pages) in Google. A higher ranking in the search giant obviously means you get more targeted, organic traffic, and your website will have more potential of bringing more customers to your brand, boosting your brand’s exposure, and helping you reach a turnover that allows you to call your business successful. In this post, we shared some of the most important tips to take into account when it comes to choosing the right keywords to target in your SEO campaign.
