How do people find your website? You might think that they stumble upon you because you come in near the top of Google’s SERP. But that only comes after they take an important action: searching for businesses like yours.
The important thing at this stage is to know what terms people are searching for when they want your products or services.
In other words, you need to do some keyword research so that Google understands what your page is about – and when they should show it to their audience. Knowing how to choose keywords for SEO is the first hurdle to more traffic.
Many businesses come to Creative Collective unsure about how people find them. There is a lot of work to be done to find the ideal SEO keyword that encompasses everything your brand has to offer. It’s an essential piece of digital marketing as well as your SEO strategy.
While we can help you find the right keyword for your service pages, you can also do it yourself with some of these tips, tricks, and tools.
How to Choose Keywords for SEO with 7 Tips & Tricks
Before we dive into the tools you can use to generate keyword ideas, let’s take a look at how to pinpoint the right keywords for your content marketing. Here are our top tips that anyone can use to find relevant keywords for their brand without our professional help.
(Of course, we offer a done-for-you service that can help you rank on Google’s search engine, but you can follow these guidelines for DIY keyword research.)
1. Use Long Tail Keywords Instead of Competitive Phrases
When it comes to keyword selection, you don’t want to use something so broad that it will be hard to rank. This is the case for generic keywords that only include one or two words. Shorter phrases often have intense competition, making it much harder to rank for these phrases.
If you want something that doesn’t have such a high keyword difficulty, then you should consider a long tail keyword instead.
Long tail keywords have three to five words and are much easier to rank for, but why?
If someone types five words into Google’s search engine, they likely already have a very good idea of what they want to see. Each search term is highly specific and you can get to the search intent much faster (more on this in a minute).
Your long tail keyword ideas might seem so specific that they exclude some users, but they actually convert better because of specificity.
According to research, 70 percent of search traffic comes from long tail keywords. Couldn’t every business use that kind of traffic instead of getting bogged down in generic search terms that don’t move the needle forward?
2. Understand Search Intent
It doesn’t matter which keyword research tool you use. If you don’t understand what people want when they search for your website, then you won’t be able to deliver on your promise.
Consider the many reasons why a customer might turn to Google to find what they’re looking for:
- Navigational: They want to find a specific page and they don’t know the URL.
- Informational: They want to learn something new about a specific topic.
- Commercial: They are researching a specific purchase.
- Transactional: They are ready to buy a product or invest in your services.
Understanding what people want to see under the search result allows you to tailor your posts, service pages, and product landing pages more specifically. You can easily address their core concerns and objections, all while moving them one step further along your sales funnel.
Not everyone who comes to your page is ready to invest, but search engine optimization and keyword research guides you to select the type of content they need at any given point.
3. Competitor Analysis for Keyword Selection
Chances are that you already know how your competition is ranking for the keywords that you want to take a swing at. You spend endless hours flipping through their social media and trying to figure out their target keyword so that you can steal some of their traffic.
While copying them may not be the solution, it can give you a good idea of potential keywords for your industry.
There are lots of keyword research tools you can use to see what terms your competitors rank for that you don’t. Then, you can take the best keywords (those focused on transactional intent) and structure the content on your website. This is hard to do without investing in a tool, but you can do it with minimal out-of-pocket cost.
I recommend Keysearch for this function, but there are lots of other tools out there that can help with SEO keyword selection and competitor rankings. We’ll look at Keysearch in more detail in a minute when we move on to the keyword tool that helps businesses come up with their own strategy.
4. Think About Keyword Difficulty
When you’re coming up with a keyword list, you have to think about one important thing: how hard is it going to be to rank for a given term? The more competition you have for your search terms, the less likely you are to show up in the top ten organic results (and if you’re on page two, your traffic drops off considerably).
You can see more information on ROI for SEO here.
The good news is that you don’t have to be a wildly talented marketer to figure out a specific keyword that you can use in your SEO strategy. You can use Ahrefs Keyword Difficulty Checker to run multiple keywords and find ones that have a low keyword difficulty with less competition.
It even shows you the top ten results on Google so that you can think about making related posts using similar head keywords.
Ahrefs ranks their keywords on a scale of 0 to 100 with higher scores showing terms that will be harder to rank for. While you can get a good idea of search volume using the tools below, your keyword strategy should also look for those that are easier to rank for which makes the biggest difference in your SEO effort.
5. Don’t Forget Seasonal Trends
Chances are that your keyword list is going to have at least a few items that hit differently depending on the time of year. This might mean back-to-school, holiday shopping, summer sales, and any other times when your website gets more traffic for a specific item or service.
To this end, you should always look at the calendar year. Don’t underestimate the importance of seasonal trends.
A great free tool to use for this purpose is Google Trends. This tool allows you to see how any keyword or topic has trended over the past day, week, month, or even years. It’s a very underestimated SEO tool that can help you as much as a keyword explorer.
Google Trends is also an awesome tool if you want to think about creating relevant, up-to-the-minute content instead of more evergreen content marketing. You can explore current trends which might include celebrities, sports, and breaking news – all of which give you ideas for multiple keywords you can capitalize on right away.
Of course, you can also do similar research with a keyword tool like Keysearch to see a snapshot of the past twelve months of search history with any specific keyword.
6. Avoid Black Hat SEO
There’s no faster way to get penalized by Google than using black hat SEO techniques like keyword stuffing. This can include making your font the same color as your background and then typing in a list of keywords that you want to rank for.
It lessens the user experience on your page which causes them to bounce faster – another signal to the search engine that your content isn’t worth ranking.
Not to mention, Google quickly catches onto website design like this. You’ll find yourself ranking down in the SERPs faster than you can blink, even if you did manage to rank for a short time.
Stick with using above-board techniques like incorporating LSI keywords which are easily found with tools like Market Muse and Surfer SEO. These signal to the search engines that you have comprehensive information that users are looking for, increasing your odds of ranking on a topic.
7. Focus on Local SEO Terms
Don’t forget that local SEO terms are just as important when choosing the best keywords. If you have a brick-and-mortar business, then you want people in your area to be able to find you. Running a Google Ad could help people discover you faster, but your long-term SEO strategy should help you rank without paid advertisements.
Not to mention, most users trust organic search results over sponsored posts. If you can show up in the local Google Map pack with a picture of your retail location and all your pertinent contact details, you can tap into a significant source of traffic.
You should also use keywords like “near me” to target customers who are searching for businesses like yours.
Finding the Right Keyword Research Tool: Free & Premium Options
The good news is that finding a keyword research tool is easier than ever before. We have already looked at a couple of free options from Ahrefs and Google Trends, but there are others you might want to consider.
Here are our favorite premium and free options to enhance your digital marketing.
Google Keyword Planner
Even if you don’t think you’re going to run a Google Ad, you can still make good use of their Keyword Planner. It’s a free tool that should be your first stop when trying to figure out keywords that will rank, have the right search intent, and have decent search volume.
However, this tool does more to help you find the right keyword for your brand.
It also enables you to see the monthly search volume and the average cost for impressions with an ad campaign and helps you to organize keywords into your SEO strategy. By the time you finish looking over this robust option, you’ll have strategic marketing ideas that you can put into place.
You may also want to use this side-by-side with Google Search Console to get an idea of how your site ranks for existing keywords and where you can improve with the strategies you came up with in the Keyword Planner. Both of these tools give more information than Google Analytics alone (which is a must-have for every website owner).
Keysearch
By far, my favorite tool for search engine optimization is Keysearch. It’s less expensive than other tools on the market like SEMRush and SE Ranking, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t pack a powerful punch for SEO strategy.
You can start with a general idea of what you want to rank for and it will show you hundreds of related keywords. It even ranks them according to keyword difficulty so that you can see opportunities to fill gaps in the digital market.
However, it also enables you to do competitor analysis that shows where your competition is ranking, what pages are ranking, and where you could improve your strategy to show up in the search result pages.
If you want to know what type of content is working for the rest of your industry, then this is the go-to tool that won’t break the budget.
Content Creation Tools
Once you have keyword ideas in mind, it’s time to think more specifically about your content marketing. What kind of content will you create and what will it say to capitalize on all that SEO keyword research? You need to know related keywords that give you insight into search intent, keyword difficulty, and more without reverting to black-hat SEO tactics.
This is where you can benefit from content optimizers like Market Muse, Surfer SEO, or Frase.
All of these tools give you LSI keywords which are an important piece of evergreen content marketing. Investing in these SEO tools is a quick way to make sure you hit everything your end user expects to see on your page for your target keyword.
Final Thoughts: How to Choose Keywords for SEO Like an Expert
Whether you decide to use Google’s Keyword Planner or a premium tool like Keysearch, there are tons of options out there to help you make the tough calls about which ones are the best keywords for your audience.
Comb through the data to find your ideal keyword list and then leverage that to devise a content marketing strategy that will help you rank.
It’s a lot of work at the very start, but this initial heavy lifting can yield huge dividends for your marketing efforts.
Of course, you can also skip using these tools and trust your SEO keyword research to the professionals here at Creative Collective. We help you come up with a custom content calendar that targets the keywords that matter to you, your clients, and your competition.