This is part two in a series of articles in which we discuss the reasons why every small business should be worried about SEO and the best way to start addressing and improving organic search ranking without breaking the bank. The focus is Keywords.
Part One Recap, Why SEO is Important
We went over a lot in part one particularly about the reason why SEO is something you should care about as a small business owner.
The main points we discussed were:
- SEO is changing a website so it ranks higher on search engines for selected keywords
- When we talk about search engines, we are mostly speaking about Google
- Successfully optimizing a website will increase the traffic and revenues of the site
- You don’t have to be a professional to get results
- It takes time for changes to take effect, it is a constantly evolving practice
- You cannot cheat the system, you’ll get Hurt like Johnny Cash
- To take the first steps, you need to choose the right keywords / phrases
How to Select Keywords & Phrases
Now that we have a decent understanding of what SEO is and how you can use it to increase traffic, we can select our keywords and start optimizing for them.
One of the best strategies for a small website to start gaining traction with certain keywords is to go after Long Tail Keywords (keywords which are not the name of the website or company, and also relate to your website). These are keywords that are not among the most popularly searched terms in your website’s industry, but are much easier to start ranking for while being still popular enough to bring in traffic.
Assuming your website doesn’t have a massive audience, it wouldn’t make sense to try and compete with the big guns. For example, a new jiu jitsu gym may not want to start by optimizing for “jiu jitsu”, but rather “impact jiu jitsu” which has a lower volume and difficulty. Jiu jitsu as a search term has a volume of over 100,000 and difficulty of 28.57 compared to impact jiu jitsu at 791 and 28.57, a stark contrast.
Long tail keywords are also fantastic when it comes to converting because they are usually much more targeted. The people in our example above are looking for a specific type of jiu jitsu so they are more likely to clickthrough the highest ranking results.
The reason you choose one particular long tail keyword takes all of the above into account but goes much further so time is not wasted optimizing for keywords with less potential.
To start follow these steps
Get 5-10 examples of your ideal keywords together. You can get started by selecting keywords from your analytics which tell you the phrases visitors used to find your site. This means you are already ranking for those keywords/phrases so it may be easier to climb rankings, but may not have as much potential as other words/phrases. Alternatively, looking through your search query for what guests have searched on your site is also very helpful.
For our example, we are going to just take some of the top examples in the top image: jiu jitsu, brazilian jiu jitsu, gracie jiu jitsu, jiu jitsu near me, jiu jitsu gym.
Once you have your long-term keywords, put them into a random keyword generator to make an enormous list of keywords based off your ideals, think 500+ (some free tools for this include Google Suggest, Google Trends related queries, or some site like AHrefs). Put the total list of keywords/phrases into an excel sheet and then head over to a traffic estimator.
Google Keyword Planner is the standard which is accessible through AdWords but there are some free options as well (Wordtracker.com is good but I also like to look at Google Trends). This will give you a rough idea of the traffic each word or phrase on your massive list is getting.
Sort all of your keywords by traffic now so you can see which search terms are the most popular (you can also set it by difficulty or competition). Now, head to AHrefs or some other backlink checker and look at your site’s total backlinks, this number is directly tied to what range of keywords or phrases to target. If you have a smaller number of backlinks, you should target the lower volume keywords.
This range can vary pretty drastically which is the challenging part, but there are a few ways to weave through the confusion and figure which keywords to target. One of the best is to look at various players in your field and see what their backlink situation is, the biggest ones are likely targeting the highest volume keywords.
This isn’t the most definitive way to check and can be time consuming, but you can check out which competitors have a similar backlink number to you and see which keywords they are ranking for to compare what difficulty you should be attempting.
Once you think you know your range of keywords to target, you can have some fun looking at which keywords you want to actually go for in your range. First stop, Google Trends!
Check out the keyword volume and trajectory tab and enter all the words in your range at once to plot them out. Below is an example for just the term Jiu Jitsu, but you can enter a large range to see them plotted all together.
Here, you can also see the competition when you look at each keyword individually. You can go much farther with a range of different SAAS solutions like SEMRush, Wordtracker, AHrefs paid or others but this process should be enough to cover most small websites with getting started on improving organic rank.
You will ideally find a few keywords which are in your difficulty range and are trending upwards in popularity. These keywords are like hidden gems because they are already in the long tail, but they are seeing some resurgence in popularity so you can strike gold quickly with these if the trend sticks.
Generally, as you gain more backlinks you should be able to target the more difficult keywords that are nearer your ideal 5-10 list from earlier.
Why Select Keywords & Phrases Like This
The process of selecting keywords is not very easy and takes a lot of time but it is incredibly important for growing organic traffic. If you select the incorrect keywords or try to game the system by spamming content for a keyword or employing some kind of speedy solution, Google will dock your website and it will hurt your site more to recover than you would have gained.
Selecting the keywords that are related to your ideal keywords is extremely important to start building relevant traffic to your site. From there, you start to build backlinks to your specific lane of the internet. Realistically, you can’t go forward without knowing what keywords or phrases you want to rank for because otherwise you cannot really dial in enough to accomplish any good SEO.
What is the Next Step? On-Page SEO
On-Page SEO is specifically optimizing each page of the website and the content that appears only in relation to that specific page. Making your pages very clear is the first step towards ranking higher because you not only have better reactions from visitors, but Google’s algorithm will like your page more for being understandable and not spammy.
Much of the work is going to start with the home page of your website so in part three, we will be discussing how to optimize your home page and then the rest of your site.
