Basic guide for mastering your keywords searches

To improve the search for keywords, you need to understand them as questions typed by users on Google and other search engines that you need to answer the best way possible. The way that Google, for example, has to answer them is to offer the most relevant pages in the search results. This means that users find your website using keywords, and that is why it is so important to know how to select the most profitable and use them in your SEO onPage and Offpage.

A proper keyword analysis will save you a lot of time. You can detect and discard those that barely interest people or those that attract the wrong visitors (those who do not need what you are trying to sell or promote.) Likewise, if you learn to analyze your keywords before using them, you will avoid the kind of keywords whose competence is too strong for your abilities.

The first thing to note is that there are three types of keywords. The first kind is informational: they mean several searches since they are generic. Then you have the transactional, which have a lower number of searches (although the suggested bid may be higher than the previous ones), and, thirdly, brand keywords, which, depending on the brand, of course, may have more or fewer searches (and sometimes no bid whatsoever.)

An important issue is to understand that “keyword” and “key phrase” can really be considered synonymous in terms of information searches. After all, a key phrase is a combination of keywords that a user type to search for information, to buy or to fix a problem. Because it is not common to use a single keyword to perform searches, the usual thing to do is using a whole sentence composed of two or three keywords. For example, if you need to know if the pain you are feeling is a nephrotic colic, you will probably track the symptoms through many phrases. You will not just type “pain” on the Google bar.

Image courtesy of SEO at Flickr.com

The second thing to keep in mind is to be clear about your goals. You may need to get more traffic, or just get better conversions, although it is possible to find keywords that will allow you to have a decent traffic percentage as well as a pretty good conversion rate. If you need a good amount of traffic, you can start by looking at Google AdWords the generic and most successful keywords related to your business. Let’s say that your company is in the freight transport business. Type the word ‘transport’ and you will find the most basic keywords that have been used, and, in the extensive list that Google AdWords offers you, you will find what kind of keywords your competition is using.

What can you do with all that? You will eventually find those keywords or key phrases that have the most traffic. When you find them, then you can decide which words or phrases you should use. If your goal is conversion, then you should look at the words that have the most suggested bids and this will give you a good decision criterion.

When analyzing the keywords of your competition, identify the most disputed key phrases in the industry your business belongs. That will help you to expand your list of keywords and learn more about your niche and the type of words and phrases that users find in the first search results. To easily find out those keywords, you can use, for example, SEMrush.

Now, little by little you will gather a lot of keywords. The next step is to debug those that simply do not suit you (remember that you must be quite strategic here.) Normally, it is advisable to choose phrases that suggest an action, not the product or service you sell. If your business is a hotel in the Caribbean, it is more advantageous to positioning your hotel thanks to the phrase “find a hotel in the Caribbean online” or “hotels in the Caribbean online” than by the generic keyword “hotel” (although the latter means far more searches.) The reason for all this is that users who are looking for those keywords already express the desire to perform some action related to such keywords or phrases.

The best way to discard keywords is to put yourself in the shoes of the user who is looking for information. Think about what users expect to find through a particular keyword. Is this a potential customer? Never forget that your visitors should find on your website what they have asked the engine. How do you do it? Just do not cheat: you don’t want them to leave your website immediately.

The basics are having what users are looking for and knowing how to drive them there. Keep that in mind