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Search Engine Optimisation Basics & FAQ’s
Before you start your sites Search Engine Optimisation to optimise each of your web pages, you should know some things about website promotion and search engine optimisation techniques. Here, you’ll learn how SEO helps you to get more customers and more sales.
If there is a single concept that is the driver of much of the Internet’s growth over the past decade, not to mention nearly all of Google’s annual revenue of billions of dollars, it is the concept of keywords.
Keywords are what we type in when we are searching for products, services, and answers on the search engines. This translates to over 40,000 search queries that Google processes every second on average, over 3.5 billion searches per day, and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide as listed by www.internetlivestats.com.
Companies optimise their webpages for search by choosing keywords for those pages. The implications for a business of picking the right keywords are therefore huge. Keyword selection is fundamental to success when it comes to executing a paid search or PPC campaign. Simultaneously, it is also integral to a website natural or organic ranking on the search engines.
But keywords are not just about SEO. They at the heart of a company’s marketing campaign at its most granular level. If you can’t identify the most important keywords for your company immediately then it is doubtful that you can effectively market your products and services to your target audience. This guide will provide you with ideas to keep in mind when you are selecting keywords on which to build your online marketing.
Focus on Good Phrases
When it comes to search engine marketing, there may be no larger misnomer, no more archaic term than the word ‘keyword’. It has now had an official migration to the more accurate term ‘keyphrase’. SEO frustration is born from trying to organically rank for a single word. This is rarely the strategy that we at Digital Attraction employ when doing keyword research and selection in the service of PPC and SEO campaigns.
All too often, people dramatically overthink the most basic keyword research concepts. Keyword generation should start simply by answering the question of “What products or services do you sell?” If you sell dog food online, the root words dog and food alone would be very poor keywords. This is because, on their own, neither dog nor foods do a remotely good job at describing what you sell. Though this example makes it obvious, many times we have to fight through our urge to include those bigger, broader root keywords.
Avoiding “Narcissism” Keywords
Now let’s look at a trickier example—one where the root keyword arguably does a good job describing what we are selling. Say I own an online perfume store that sells all types of perfume. To rank highly for the keyword perfume would probably be at the top of my search engine marketing goals. And yet this would probably not be a profitable keyword that will drive relevant traffic to my site. That is because, from an organic SEO perspective, you are unlikely to rank highly for this term unless you are a huge, highly authoritative site—or lucky enough to be perfume.com.au, knowing that Google rewards keywords that match website addresses.
In this case, you would do well to go after more specific keywords such as women’s perfume, female fragrance, or fragrance gift ideas. Not only is the competition for these terms less fierce but, from both an SEO and a PPC perspective, those more specific keywords are going to have a significantly higher conversion rate to purchases on your site.
Sometimes we refer to those root keywords as “narcissism keywords,” because if you do just one search to see who seems to be winning the space, you are likely to pick the single broadest keyword and see who comes up ranked highly. In nearly every case, however, we have found it to be more successful and deliver a significantly better return on your SEM (search engine marketing) investment by focusing on the hundreds or even thousands of more specific keywords that more closely match the services, products, brands, and locations that you sell or serve.
Using Google’s Search Console
This is, in my opinion, the best little secret of everyone’s favourite search engine: the Google Search Console. Released about a year ago but virtually unknown compared with Google’s much more visible search tools like Google analytics, the Search Console can be accessed by simply doing a search, signing in and then selecting “Performance” on the left-hand navigation.
What you are presented with now is a visual representation of the keyword performance that Google ranks your site for. The very focus of the tool has to do with “search” and “optimisation.” This together with Google keyword planner can become the basis of your PPC and SEO keyword research.
Some of GSC’s best insights come from just glancing at the dashboard. SEO marketers need to keep up with the dashboard on a regular basis. Google Search Console provides some of the same data as Analytics but in a simpler and more straightforward way. There’s less tweaking you can do with the numbers, but easier access to them.
The Value of Repetition
One concern we hear frequently is whether it is beneficial or harmful to repeat keywords. In other words, should we vary keywords e.g. (dog food, puppy food, and Purina) or repeat keywords (dog food reviews, dog food comparison, and dog food rankings.) The short answer is that the repetition is just fine, as long as the meaning of the phrase as a whole is sufficiently varied. In other words, dog food and dog food online are basically synonymous, and the content that one might expect to find associated with both keywords is the same. However, dog food reviews and dog food comparison indicate somewhat different content and therefore are appropriate to be used in tandem as keywords.
The more important concept to keep in mind is that you want to choose keywords that best relate to the content present on a web page and on a website; if you don’t have a dog food comparison matrix, then don’t bother including comparison-related keywords; you are misleading your users, and certainly not fooling Google. So in an ideal world, you do have a comparison section, a reviews section, and a rankings section, housed on different pages or sections of your site, with each one tagged with the appropriate keywords. Correspondingly, your SEO and PPC search engine marketing efforts should that content by driving review keywords to the review pages and so on.
Guiding Your Content Strategy
Keywords should guide your overall content strategy. We have referred to this concept several times in the preceding tips, but it is important enough to leave as a final guiding paradigm.
Conventionally, we think linearly about content and keywords; we build a website and then launch search engine marketing campaigns to drive users to our content. That approach has its limits. When we think about strategy at Digital Attraction, we think about a circular process; since our keyword research reflects both what users are seeking and the way that the search engines (particularly Google) “think” about keywords, we let that help to drive our content strategy.
Put differently, to be phenomenally successful, we seek not to take static content and try to pry greater results from it; instead, we leverage the existing needs of the users and use that knowledge to help us create the best possible user experience. That, in turn, will be rewarded with higher rankings, greater traffic, and a higher ROI from our marketing efforts.
Continuing to post new content and refresh old content is also a valuable strategy to be seen as relevant to search engines ever-changing algorithms.
You will also learn which things you should avoid. Below are some frequently asked questions that will answer the basic questions of why you need have your site pages optimised as well as best practice techniques that professionals use.
If it is all too daunting then take the stress away! Contact Us if you need a FREE, no-obligation inbound marketing appraisal.
Google also has a page that can enlighten. By following this guide, you should learn enough to be well on your way to an optimised site.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Ethical search engine optimisation methods leads to a symbiotic relationship:
- Search engines win as they are provided with pages that are easy to understand and that contain the quality information that their visitors search for.
- Searchers win as they are getting what they ask for from the search engines. They search for "inexpensive drones" and get a page about inexpensive drones
- Web site owners win as they are getting quality visitors who are interested in what their website has to offer. Digital Attraction helps you to build websites that are beneficial to web surfers, website owners and search engines.
Increase traffic, sales and opportunities by becoming an effective inbound marketing organisation. Contact us for a no-obligation consultation offering your business free business marketing assessment.