SEO: choosing the right keywords
Choosing your keywords is sometimes a more complicated job than it seems. Determining which words you want to focus your message on often takes time and takes many criteria into account. The implications of this choice are great for the natural referencing of your website, because it is thanks to these expressions that Internet users will be able to find you. I offer you a list of 10 steps to choose your keywords in a thoughtful and consistent way.
1 - competition around a keyword
The first step is first of all not to see too big, otherwise you risk breaking your teeth. You have to think about the feasibility of your SEO. In short, don't try to get first on the keyword "car" with a new site. It won't be possible. When choosing your keywords, think about other sites that want to rank for them. If they are numerous and well established, it is in your interest to choose alternative words, which will undoubtedly bring you a little less traffic, but on which you can be visible.
2 - the equivocity of words
Then, it is a work on language. In other words, a work on the meaning of the words chosen, on what they mean according to their context of use. You have to choose your keywords to avoid finding yourself in competition with other industries using them as well. For example: you are selling soccer balls on your site, you will want to be present on the “ball” request. Except that a ball can be a soccer ball, a basketball, an inflatable ball, a hot water balloon or even the Ballon d'Alsace! The best way to avoid this equivocity is to choose your keywords more restrictively; to orient its content correctly on the request “soccer ball” and not simply “ball”. Good to know: most requests on Google are longer than 3 words,
3 - Singular or plural?
Regarding the expressions chosen, you must also determine whether you want to use them in the singular or in the plural. Note that a keyword with or without “s” is not the same thing.
4 - the words used for your customers
One of the best ways to get your customers to find you on Google is to use the phrases they use. Even if these expressions are incorrect or inaccurate, stand by them.
5 - Avoid technical or corporate terms
Along with the advice below, don't use technical or business-specific terms because your customers may not be familiar with them. If you use technical jargon, your site will only be visited by your colleagues or your competitors.
6 - Think about generating contact
If choosing your keywords is for the SEO of your site; SEO aims to generate inbound contacts. Therefore, think about the keywords that will generate the first contact. Think of the Internet user who types in his request and at what stage of the need he is? Concretely, imagine that you have an e-commerce site selling cameras, you have much more interest in optimizing queries like “canon eos 600d” than “camera”. Why ? Because the user who types the precise name of a model has chosen his model, he is ready to buy it. Whoever will type only the generic expression “camera” will be in a comparison phase, so it is a less “mature” prospect, more distant from the act of purchase.
7 - see if the chosen keywords are popular
Choosing your keywords is also ensuring their popularity. If we were to name just one tool, it would be Google's Keyword Planner . An even faster way is to use Google's suggestion tool when you start typing a query. those who want to go, there are tools like Ãœbersuggest or SemRush .
8 - Check which words are used by your competitors
It is always helpful to use the work of others. Perfect maxim for choosing keyword, look at what keywords are used for your competing sites. They've already gone through this step, so this lets you see what their conclusions are. Pay particular attention to keywords used in Title and Description tags.
9 - Also use synonyms
Even if you have chosen specific expressions, be sure to optionally use synonyms so that your text does not look like spam.
10 - Play the semantic coherence card
Finally, when creating content, be sure to create content that revolves around the universe of your keywords, even if your keywords do not appear expressly there., if you sell camera, it makes sense to create content about “shootings”, even if the keyword “canon eos 600d” does not appear there. This makes it possible to provide Google with a coherent semantic structure.
11. Choose secondary keywords
Secondary keywords are more of a positioning opportunity . Indeed, in addition to selling your product, such as training, you could keep a news blog and cover topics related to your industry.
In this context, it may be interesting to position yourself on secondary keywords that you cover on your site, indirectly linked to your commercial activity.
Did you know ?
Secondary keywords are also synonyms for your main keyword.
They also make it possible to adapt to the abbreviations used by Internet users and must also relate to a specific page.
This sort of semantic field around the same page will allow Google to analyze a “corpus” of keywords around a subject and position you at the top of the results.
How to work on your lexical field?
To enhance your keywords, consider enriching your lexical field with rich words. To do this, study the lexical field associated with your activity and place these expressions in your content.
Here is a simple example of a lexical field for an activity in tourism:
12. Brainstorm
This first step is to create a list of keywords that will serve as a basis for your work. It is about throwing down on paper all the ideas of expressions or words that Internet users could be led to type on the search engines and which would lead them to you.
interview your current customers
look for synonyms
look at the competitors
13. Select
At this stage, it is necessary to keep only the keywords that could bring you useful traffic for your activity. That is to say, targeted traffic. This is to make a first qualification of the Internet users who visit your site. For example, if you have a violin store in Lille, Nice internet users are not really interesting for you, as are internet users looking for information on pianos 😉
14. Evaluate
Evaluate the potential traffic for each of the keywords found in steps one and two. It is, in fact, to keep only the most promising words in terms of traffic. To do this, you will need to use tools like Market Samurai or Google's keyword planning tool .
15. Check
Here is the last, but no less important, step. For each keyword from the previous steps, check the competition level. This step is often neglected, which is a shame, because it will be very difficult to reach the first pages of Google on these words. Better to focus on less competitive words on which it will be easier to position yourself well and which all together will bring you significant traffic rather than bet on a very competitive word, even if its potential traffic is enormous.
What are keywords anyway?
Keywords are:
Words and phrases people are searching for
Words and phrases that describe topics you have written
In an ideal world, these keywords are similar, which reduces the difference between your content and your audience, and helps to find them.
Keyword research is the practice of finding the words that people enter in search engines so that you can use them for web pages, content creation and marketing.
Why do keyword research?
As we said earlier, keyword research is an important part of SEO. Keywords are an important SEO ranking factor that Google uses to decide where to place your content in search results. Get them right, and Google will understand what your content is, making it easy to pop up at the right time in response to a search.
Keyword research helps you get into the heads of your customers by finding topics to include in your content strategy. When you know what your target audience is looking for, you can optimize your content to give them the answers they need.
Examining keywords that target your competitors can help you refine your own content strategy. Our Tools section below has some tools to help you with competitive keyword research.
Is Keyword Research Still Relevant? How has the search changed
Some people wonder if this keyword is worth the research. Short answer: Yes, it is. But if you are not trying to do SEO like 2006.
In the past, one of the purposes of keyword research was to link your content with words that people were looking for to artificially push pages to the top of search results. Quality was often considered less important than true keyword density - having a certain percentage of the same keyword within the content.
This kind of approach no longer works. In fact, it is often punished compared to rewarded. Google continues to explore how its search algorithms work to deliver search results that are more relevant to the people who want to search.
We will look in that direction in more detail, as we go through the guide, but here are two hallmarks of discovery today:
People are using mobile devices with digital assistants that allow them to search by voice. This means that they are using natural language and asking questions, not just typing in search phrases.
Google tries to answer many questions promptly through the answer box. These are usually based on well-adapted, relevant content.
Keywords related to semantics are now a thing. You do not optimize content for only a single target phrase, but for related phrases that mean basically the same thing. We will see this guide later.
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