Your website is one of the most important tools for your business. With it, you can answer customer questions, drive in new leads, and build your audience. That's why it's not enough to just add content to your website, you need to add the right content. Keywords are the way to make sure you are driving the crowd most likely to convert into customers.
Creating a list of keywords is only half of the battle, though. Strategically incorporating your keywords, reviewing long-tail keywords, and understanding semantic search help in optimizing content for higher search rankings.
Keyword optimization is more than just throwing a bunch of words relevant to your business on a page. Your team should be creating relevant content that provides real value to your audience and accurately answers their search queries. They should seamlessly appear in ways your audience can't detect. Understanding how your pages perform can help you adjust keywords and keyword variations to bring you the best result.
When optimizing your content, there are a few places you should look to first. These are key areas that your selected words should appear, ensuring you pin your site to the top of the search engine results page.
Where Should You Put Keywords?
- The title tag: The title tag is the header of your website page and how it will appear when it's generated in a search result. This should contain enough information to spark the user's interest.
- URL: You want to keep your URL concise, but informational. One look should tell your audience what they're going to get out of this page. It's important to keep track of how you're naming URLs for a structured SEO strategy. In a search result, the URL will appear alongside the title tag and meta description. An SEO best practice is to keep your URL to 4-5 words, but this can vary depending on your content.
- Meta description: Meta descriptions are summaries of the page's content that appear in the search result. They should communicate a main idea or topic and elaborate on the title tag. Most often, meta descriptions are limited to 160 characters, so keep it short and sweet.
- The body of your content: When a user clicks on the link, seeing the keyword present in the title tag, meta description, and URL, it only makes sense to have it reappear as they consume the content you linked to. As they navigate through your website, they should not realize how often your keywords appear. It should be worked in effortlessly, so the reader can easily navigate around the page.
- image Alt Text: Image alt text, short for alternative text, describes the image that is present on your page through a series of words. Alt text should be descriptive, but not long winded. Although your audience doesn't see the alt text, web crawlers will read them and use that knowledge to determine what to pull when a user enters a query. Not to mention, having alt text is a measure of your website's accessibility and an SEO best practice. By providing this, those who are visually impaired can understand the images on each page.
How to Use Long-Tail Keywords
It's not enough to focus on one keyword, though. Too much of that and you'll get docked for keyword stuffing, ultimately hurting your site more than helping it. To combat that, make sure to incorporate long-tail keywords in your content as well. Rather than focusing on one or two specific words, long-tail keywords add more dimension and detail to your content - helping to narrow the audience down to who you can help.
Long-tail keywords often have less competition than your run of the mill keywords, assisting in boosting your rankings. A good mix of keywords and long-tail keywords gives you the variation that makes reviewing your content enjoyable for the reader, while diversifying your content enough to drive in the right leads.
To better understand, let's use a boutique as an example. Their main keyword may be "clothing," a word with lots of competition that doesn't necessarily garner the right audience. Some long-tail keywords they could use that would benefit their SEO strategy include: "women's small summer dresses"; "vegan leather women's footwear" or "checkered dress pant for women".
Semantic Search
While keywords and long-tail keywords are a crucial component to any SEO strategy, it's important to note that Google has gotten increasingly more attuned to the way users search. Through all the iterations of Google updates, each new wave was a step in further understanding what someone is looking for. Most of us don't search the way we would ask a question, but rather input short snippets of words and hope Google knows what we mean, and often it does. This is called semantic search.
Semantic search thinks through the user's intent as well as the semantic meaning of the terms used in the query. Basically, searching isn't just about what words you put in the search bar, but what you're trying to get out of the search from that combination of words. Google is sophisticated enough to dissect that all within a few seconds.
For example, if someone was looking for the newest Tom Holland movie, they wouldn't open up their browser to search, "What's the name of the new Tom Holland movie that just came out?" rather, the query could look something like "Tom Holland new movie." Odds are, in the top search results, an IMDB listing will show all the details of the newly released film.
Although the title of that page is not "new Tom Holland movie" but rather "Every new Tom Holland Movie" or "Chaos Walking" Google understands that the user is searching for details on the movie, and also understands timelines against the current date, to pull the answer that makes the most sense.
Increase your rankings with SEO Strategies
Tools like HubSpot make search engine optimization and ranking for your keywords easier than you would think. By providing an array of tools, HubSpot helps guide brands to optimize pages and offers suggestions you may not have previously considered. By using a similar software, you can learn how you can improve your keyword rankings and what other keywords your brand should explore.
By working your keywords into your content throughout various locations seamlessly, you'll be well on your way to a successful SEO strategy. SEO, however, is not an instant fix. It can take weeks and months to really see an improvement.
The Modern Driven Media team has expertise in keyword research, blog writing, SEO strategies, and website design. For assistance with your website optimization, contact us.
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