What is Keyword SEO and Why It Is Important 101 Guide
You probably already know that keywords are essential for SEO, but what are we talking about when we talk about SEO keywords? How can you find the right keywords for your website and, more importantly, how can you use those keywords in your content and increase your SEO?
I’ll address some of these queries in this post.
Let’s start with the definition of SEO Keywords.
What is Keyword SEO?
When using search engines to find information, people utilize words or phrases known as SEO keywords. Your chances of showing up in search results for these terms increase if you incorporate these keywords into your content.
SEO keywords make it easier for search engines to understand what your content is about and help users find the information they need.
Why are Keywords Important?
As you can guess, keywords are very important for SEO. Search engines have a difficult time comprehending your content’s significance if you don’t use the proper SEO keywords. Your prospects of attracting organic traffic to your website are decreased. The way search engines work is to match users’ search queries to pages in their index.
During the crawling and registration process, searchers visit web pages. They extract the information they need and add it to their index. They use this information later during the “matching” process (also called the grading process). Part of the information they extract is the keyword associated with the web page.
If your website is linked to the wrong keywords during this process, you have no chance to appear on the top of the results for keywords relevant to your website.
To help you better know this, allow me to use an example.
Let’s say you want to post an announcement for [electrical machine]. You create a page and highlight your product (product name, product image, etc.).
Unless you declare on the page that they are electric, Google may link your page to the bike, which is not what you want. What you should do instead is find out the keywords that people use as search terms when looking for e-bikes and make sure that those keywords are part of your content.
Related: Keyword Research In SEO Look at This Ultimate Guide 101
There are Different Types of SEO Keywords
Keywords are divided into two types: head and long tail keywords.
Headwords (also called seed keywords) usually consist of one or two words and have limited search results.
Long-tail keywords have more words and have a lower search volume than keywords, but they account for 70% of all searches. The important thing to understand at this point is that the main keywords may have more search volume, but they also compete.
This means that thousands of websites are striving for one of the highest rankings in the SERPS, making it impossible for new websites (or small businesses) to compete for these rankings.
The solution is to focus on long-tail keywords.
They have a small search engine but with the right SEO strategy, it is possible to rank high on Google and get targeted organic traffic to your website.
Related: 13 Amateur Blogger Mistakes Stop These Mistakes Right now
How to Choose Keywords for SEO
Let’s see how to choose the “right” SEO keywords to use in your content.
In SEO, this procedure is referred to as keyword research.
Step 1: Choose the “search phrases” that you want to be recognized for.
Spend some time reflecting on the following as a starting step:
- What search terms would you like to be known for on the internet
- What search terms or phrases can people use in search engines to find you
- What words best describe your product or service
- What keywords best describe your niche
The result of the above exercise should be a list of phrases that we will use to turn into a list of words in the next step.
Step 2: Create a list of topics
To create a keyword list, you need to take the list created above and combine it with the actual keywords that people are typing into the search box, that is, SEO keywords. To do this, we need the help of keyword research tools.
There are many tools you can use, but my recommended tools are Google Keyword Planner (free) and Semrush (paid).
Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is part of Google Ads and is offered by Google for free to Google Ads customers.
Nevertheless, you may uncover your SEO keywords with this excellent keyword research tool.
Create an account on Google Ads by going there.
Follow these steps to create an ad campaign so that the process gives you access to Keyword Planner.
Once you have completed the campaign process, select Tools > Keyword Planner.
Click Search for new keywords
For this example, let’s say you are a dog breeder who sells online courses that teach people how to train their dogs.
If you enter relevant keywords into the Keyword Planner, a list of keyword ideas that match your needs will be displayed.
Note that in addition to the headline, the tool has a few other columns.
“Monthly search volume,” tells you how many searches are made on Google each month for that term and “competition” gives you an idea of how competitive a keyword is.
By “competition” we mean the number of people looking to advertise that article on Google Ads.
Remember that Keyword Planner is a tool for Google PPC advertising and not for SEO search results.
Choose some keywords that are very important to your website and products, both “head” and “long tail” keywords, put them on the sheet, and proceed to the next step.
Step 3: Find semantic SEO keywords
The next step is to find keywords related to your target keywords. These keywords are called semantic keywords or LSI keywords.
A semantic term is a subject that is closely related to another subject. The reason you want to do this is that Google no longer indexes pages that target individual keywords, but instead targets keywords.
So, by finding LSI keywords for your keywords and including them in your content, you help Google understand your content better, which improves rankings.
The best way to find LSI keywords is to use the LSI Keyword Tool in Google Search.
LSI Keyword Generator
Go to the LSI chart in your topic, and click Search. Keep those words and put them in the second column of your newsletter.
Google search
When searching for keywords on Google, there are two ways to determine what Google considers relevant keywords for a given search term. The first is to check the “People also ask” section.
The second is the “Search related to…” section.
SEMRUSH
SEMRUSH is my favorite keyword research tool.
Among many other useful features, it has two powerful tools for topic analysis. The first is “Keyword Magic Tool” and the second is “Keyword Research”.
With SEMRUSH, you don’t have to go through the process of creating an account with Google Keyword Planner or go to LSIGraph and Google search to find related keywords. Everything is done inside SEMRUSH.
Keyword Magic Tool
The first step is to create an account (there is a 7-day free trial). Then select KEYWORD MAGIC TOOL under KEYWORD ANALYTICS.
Type your keyword and click SEARCH. SEMRUSH will gather related keywords.
Sort words by volume and KD (Difficult Word). Unlike Google Keyword Planner, KD refers to the main RANK for a particular keyword in Google.
This is a very useful metric because what you want is to choose the right SEO keywords that have a high search volume and reduce the KD score.
Subject Search
Remember what I said above that Google now ranks websites based on keywords and not just keywords?
A keyword research tool will help you find long tail keywords related to a topic. Click TOPIC SEARCH on the left menu and type in our topic.
What you see on the right (under interesting questions), are questions related to your niche. It’s like “People Also Ask” but it’s much bigger since it includes questions from different places.
How can you benefit from it?
These questions can help you develop relevant keywords, which you need if your goal is to rank high on Google.
How can you do this in practice? Optimize your homepage for your keywords, and create content (via blogs) targeting each query (mainly long-tail keywords).
Make sure that on your blog you link to your page.
How to Use SEO Keywords in Your Content
Doing good keyword research and having a list of keywords is not enough.
To benefit from this process, you need to know how to use these keywords in your content. This is known as SEO content, which is part of on-page SEO.
Here are some tips to follow:
Create your main page for your topic
Homepage SEO is very important. Search engines start the crawling process from the home page and follow all links from there.
When it comes to keyword optimization, you should be optimizing your site for your main keywords (even if their keywords are very high). The reason for this is that you want crawlers and users to understand exactly what your website is about.
Create separate pages for each of your topics
Let’s say your business sells services (like my business), you need to create pages for each of your services, each page should be good for keywords. Check out how my work page is organized.
I have a collection of documents for all my services and pages for each service we offer. Each page is organized for a specific topic.
Create content pieces to target long-tail keywords
Once you’ve made a point, that’s it.
You can use keyword search results to decide which keywords to target in your blog posts.
Use SEO keywords to optimize your content
When writing content for your pages and blog posts, you need to make sure that:
Use keywords in the URL – you include your target keywords in the page URL. Use keywords in the page title – you have your target keywords in the page title.
Use keywords in H1 tags – you include your target keywords (or variations) in h1 tags
Use long tail keywords as headings (h2, h3) – you include related keywords in your headings.
Use LSI keywords in your content – you include LSI keywords in your copy. These guidelines will help you understand this better:
Final Words about SEO Keywords
It is important to choose the right keywords for your website.
When choosing keywords, try to think outside the box and consider all the possible search terms that people can use in search engines to find your product.
Add these keywords to the spreadsheet and take advantage of the data provided by the various keyword tools to expand your keyword list as much as possible.
Put your words into two forms. First, the keywords you will use on your front page and website page, and second, the keywords you will use on your blog.
Follow the on-page SEO tips outlined above to wisely include keywords in your copy, but be sure to pay close attention to content quality.
Post content related to your target topic to create content relevance and watch your rankings and traffic increase.
