One of the most important services we offer at Free Range Web is keyword research. Expert keyword research helps to maximise the reach of every web page, social media post and blog you make, meaning you get more visitors. But what is it and how does it work?
What are keywords?
Keyword research is an important part of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). This is the process of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through non-paid search engine results (i.e not advertising). Successful SEO pushes your page to the top of Search Engine Results Pages – often referred to as SERPs. Being at the top of the SERPs means you get a lot more traffic. Ask yourself how often you’ve bothered clicking past the first page of Google when searching for something and you’ll understand why.
Keywords are ideas and topics that define the content of your website. They are the words and phrases that users enter into search engines, and are crucial for ensuring successful website optimisation. The keywords on your site must be relevant to what people are searching for so they are more likely to find your content among all the results available. Successful keywords are as much about your audience as they are about your content, as you need to understand the needs of your visitors, the language they use and the type of content they are looking for. This is where keyword research comes in.
What is keyword research?
Keyword research services like ours help you to understand what people are searching for and how many people are searching for it. It enables you to know who your customers are and what their goals are. You probably have some ideas about the keywords you would like to rank for, which will be things like the products and services you offer. This is a good place to start, but keyword research will uncover the ways that people search for products and services like yours, and people often search for the problem they are having rather than the product or service they need. For example, if you sell automatic cat feeders you would want to rank for people asking questions like ‘How do I feed my cat when I’m away?’ as much as ‘automatic cat feeders’. SEO keyword research helps you figure out what people are looking for and enables you to create content that solves their problems.
How do I use keywords successfully?
Keywords should be used in areas of your site that both the bots that crawl the page to index the content and humans searching for information will look at. This includes the title tag and body of your content, as well as the URL, an H1 tag, meta description and alt attributes on images. These are the essential basics of keyword use but what you really need to be doing is using your keywords to create genuinely content that is genuinely interesting and useful for your visitors. Don’t be tempted to stuff your copy with keywords in ways that aren’t useful, as search engines know when you are doing this and will penalise you for it. Good SEO copywriting includes keywords in ways that feel completely natural and relevant to the text, offering high-quality and relevant content that will have visitors returning for more.
