Blog Post #4 – Tips for Keyword Generation

Generating good, useful keywords for your site is one of the most crucial parts of SEO. Without keywords that capture the intent of your target users, you cannot be found and therefore your SEO efforts fail as well as even your company itself if it relies heavily on SEO. But how do you generate useful keywords? What if you think your keywords are useful but they’re actually not? How can you put yourself into the mind of your target users and think how they would when decide to search for the answer that you want to be the one to give them? According to How To Do Keyword Research (+ Tips and Tools) by WebFX, there are 8 steps to follow in order to be successful at keyword research:

1. Brainstorm potential keywords: very self-explanatory. Brainstorm phrases and keywords you think would be useful before doing any research.
2. Research competitor keyword targeting: look at your top competitor’s keywords especially and gain inspiration off of them. Then find your audience and the words that will enable you to rank high in their SERPs.
3. Compile a list of long-tail keywords: these are longer keyword phrases that are more niche and therefore point more clearly to you.  Since longtail keywords are more refined, you’re less likely to tie with someone else for ranking on the SERP.
4. Use a keyword research tool: these will expand upon a keyword that you provide by giving you ones that are closely related and often searched by users.
5. Choose the best keywords to use: based on the relevance of keyword to user, the authority Google ranks it by, and the volume or amount of times a certain keyword gets searched per month.
6. Integrate keywords throughout your site: you can do this by thinking about the intent of your users as they search your keyword. WebFX uses the example that you may write a blog post addressing the issue they are wanting to solve based on their keyword search.
7. Organize your keyword hierarchy: make sure to add your keywords to the hierarchal parts of the HTML code of your site (ie. H1 tags, title tags, and meta descriptions) instead of randomly dropping them all over the site.
8. Make keyword research continuous: never stop researching. Times change quickly and so too should your SEO keywords and strategy.

All these tips are great things to be thinking about as you generate keywords for your site. It’s really all about doing what will rank you the highest. To do this, however, you must understand your target user’s intent and be the answer to their search need in order to gain traffic and authority.

Source: How To Do Keyword Research (+ Tips and Tools)