If you’re new to the world of optimising your website for increased traffic and want to know how to find keywords for SEO, you’ve come to the right place! Our keyword research guide takes you through the step-by-step process of figuring out what keywords are best to target for your overall website, page, product or service. Every page on your website has specific intent and a relevant keyword; our guide will teach you how to figure out what that is.
Why is it important to target specific keywords on my website?
You could be a world class writer or have an unmissable product deal on your website, but if it isn’t picked up by Google and people aren’t searching for the keywords you’ve included on the page, very few will ever find it. Search engine optimisation is all about putting yourself in the shoes of the user and making an educated and informed guess of what they’ll be searching for to find your webpage. You’ll then need the search data to go a step further and find out exactly what keywords they use.
A rich, informative and high converting landing page is only useful if people are able to find it. And that’s exactly where keyword optimisation comes into play.
Every page on your website should have a goal or keyword
Every page on your site will be different, with a different goal, user experience and content. From individual products to shop categories, blog posts and even customer services pages, it’s important to optimise each of them for a specific keyword or set of keywords. Going back to what we said above, people won’t find those pages via Google if they aren’t optimised to what the user is searching for.
We recommend creating a spreadsheet and listing out all of your web pages before moving onto the keyword research phase. You’ll map individual target keywords for each page on your site and can also track ranking improvements.
How many keywords should I target per page?
Realistically, you can optimise pages for 1 – 3 specific keywords depending on the length of the content. Don’t worry about any longer tail or associated keywords. Google is smart and you’ll most likely rank for similar keywords, even if you’re only optimising for an exact few.
Step 1: Think about the purpose of your web page
This is probably the most important stage for how to find keywords for SEO. You’ll get better at this with practice too.
Looking at individual webpages, one by one, review the content that’s on the page. What does it relate to? What’s the main narrative and reason someone would want to land on and read the page?
Examples:
If it’s a women’s clothing item: What would a user search for to find it?
Would they use the brand name? Maybe the colour? How about gender (and would they use female, ladies or womens)?
Would they use the word ‘bottoms’, ‘pants’ or ‘trousers’?
Maybe they’d incorporate the style of the item into their search.
If it’s a service, such as financial accounting: What would a user search for to find it?
Would they search for ‘financial accountant’ or ‘chartered accountant’?
Would they search for a particular city or region? For example, ‘financial accountant London’
If it’s a travel blog post relating tourist attractions in Barcelona: What would a user search for to find it?
Would they search for ‘Things to do in Barcelona’, ‘Barcelona travel guide’ or ‘Barcelona attractions’? What gets the highest level of search?
Do people want to know about individual aspects of travelling to Barcelona? The airport? Getting around? Restaurants and bars?
There’s usually several different ways of saying the same thing and it’s your mission to figure out what gets the highest level of search traffic.
Once you’ve thought out the intent for your webpage and what users might search for, it’s time to look at real-life search data.
Step 2: Do some keyword research
There are a ton of great SEO keyword research tools out there, some easier to use than others and with better data sets than others. For a free, easy to use keyword research tool, we always recommend Google’s Keyword Planner. Anyone with a Google Ads account can use it and it displays data directly from Google itself – so there’s a good degree of accuracy.
Find the Google keyword research tool here – https://ads.google.com/aw/keywordplanner/home
If you have a Google Ads account already, you’ll be taken straight to the tool dashboard. If you don’t have an account, you can create one for free.
The first screen on the Google Keyword Planner presents you with two options. ‘Discover new keywords’ is great for finding keyword ideas and determining what keywords get the highest search volume for your product/niche/service, etc. It’s also what we’ll be focusing on for how to find keywords for SEO.
‘Get search volume and forecasts’ gives you monthly search volume estimates for the exact keywords you have in mind.
To start your keyword research, click ‘Discover new keywords’ and proceed to enter keywords relating to your webpage, as suggested above. Enter up to 10 variations of keywords that you think users would search for to land on your page. Then click ‘Get results’.
You’ll then be presented with estimated monthly search volumes for the keywords you chose, plus lots of other associated keyword ideas that you may not have thought of. Sort by ‘Avg. Monthly Searches’ for the highest volume ideas.
You can also filter by regional and country searches, specific keyword inclusions and other criteria.
Choose a selection of relevant keywords for your webpage that have a decent level of search traffic and note them down.
Step 3: Check the competition
Now you have an idea of high volume keywords as options for your page targeting, it’s time to see how much competition you have for those terms. Whilst a keyword might have a ton of searches, there may be stiff competition and pages upon pages of websites ranking for the same keyword.
On the other hand, a keyword that has a slightly lower volume of searches, might have less competition. Ranking for this keyword is likely to have better traffic results as you’ll reach a higher ranking position much quicker. It’s particularly important to find high search volume, low competition keywords if you’re competing against huge brands/websites.
Here are a couple of ways in which you can check the competitiveness of keywords:
- Do a Google search for a keyword in a private browsing/incognito tab and browse the first 3-5 pages of results. If there are a lot of well-optimised competitor results and it’s clear that that a lot of them are targeting these terms, it’s going to be difficult to rank. Therefore, you may want to choose a different keyword/s or target the long-tail search for that keyword. It’s a battle between the quality of your content and site authority versus competitors.
- Check the Google Ads competition indicator on the Google Keyword Planner. Scores of Low, Medium or High indicate how many sites are bidding for the search keyword. Whilst this is more of a Pay Per Click stat, it usually ties in well with organic results.
Step 4: Optimise your website for your chosen keyword/s
Once you’ve figured out how to find SEO keywords for your website/webpage, it’s time to optimise your pages so that they stand a strong chance of firstly, ranking for the keyword, and secondly, outperforming competitor pages on the same topic.
Here are our top tips for optimising your webpage for your chosen SEO keywords. Remember, it’s important to refer to your keyword page map and optimise each page individually.
On-page keyword optimisation:
- Include your keyword in the page meta title, ideally at the start.
- Have one or more occurrences of your keyword in the H1 title and other H titles.
- Create rich, informative content for the page. This copy should be relevant and optimised with your keyword, along with some variations of the keyword. Aim to include one occurrence of your keyword for every 300 words or so.
- Include your keyword within some of the image ‘alt’ tags on the page.
Important things to note when finding keywords for SEO
- Each page should target a different keyword. You don’t want multiple pages competing with each other for the same term as Google will not know which page is most relevant.
- Analyse your internal ‘site search bar’ on Google Analytics to find out what people are searching for on your website. This can give you insights into the terminology your audience uses, which you can then input into the keyword research tool.
- Search behaviour can differ on a regional and country level. Make sure your keyword research focus on your demographic geolocation.
- If you have a small website with low domain authority, avoid targeting the highly competitive search terms. Instead, find long-tail, branded and less competitive keywords that you stand a better chance of ranking for.
- Start your website optimisation and keyword research with your highest value pages first, gradually working through your site until it’s optimised in its entirety.
- Learning how to find keywords for SEO is an on-going process. Test and repeat until you find keywords that work for you. Give any optimisation programme at least 4 months to take effect.
- Track your keyword rankings on a monthly basis. You’ll be able to monitor success and will find that traffic increases hand-in-hand with rankings. We recommend using a keyword tracking tool for this.
Optimising existing pages versus creating content for SEO
You probably already have a ton of pages on your website that need keyword optimisation. The content may be great; however, the pages may not rank for the keywords you want to target. When you originally created each page, you probably wrote the content and optimised it for what you thought people would search for and want to read, but it may not necessarily be the MOST searched for keyword.
It’s important to review existing content, do the research and then optimise it for what people actually search for, in high volumes.
On the opposite side of the scale, sometimes it’s worth creating content and new pages on your site off the back of your keyword research phase. Are people searching for a relevant product, service or information that you provide, but you don’t have content to cater to that demand? Create it! It’s important to stay on track of what people are searching for in your industry and then create content that caters to it.
That concludes our guide on how to find keywords for SEO! We hope you found it useful and can use it to help give your content a much-needed boost in traffic. Keyword research gets increasingly easier the more you do it, so practice makes perfect. Complete research for all of your key webpages using our guide and track the results.
https://toucandigital.net/seo/If you need help with your website SEO or training so you can do it yourself, get in touch with us today. We offer a variety of on-page and technical SEO services and have worked with business of all sizes and industries.