Importance of Keywords

What's the Importance of Keywords

Search engines are one of the most important ways that will bring new visitors to your site.  If someone has never even heard of your site before, a search engine might throw up your site as a good match for the keywords they enter in, or it will throw up a competitors site!

Search engines are not that intuitive, so they will not always give results that reflect what people are looking for.  They can only give results for what people are typing into the search engines, so you need to think about what people might type into the search engines to find a site, like yours.

So how do you find out the keywords that people might type into search engines, to find your site?

Well, there are a number of ways, with which you can beat your competitor's websites, when it comes to working out what people search for.  There are many good ways to find these keywords.  My favorite method is using the free Google Adwords External Keyword Tool, which can be found here:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Here you can enter keywords and it will give you further suggestions as to what people are searching for.  Ideally you need to find keywords that are searched for a number of times each month.  I would recommend finding ones that get at least 500 searches a month.

Next you need to go to Google and type in these keywords in quotation marks to see how many other websites are targeting those keywords.

For example, we can see that the keyword self help for panic attacks has over 1,000 searches a month:

When we enter the phrase  “self help for panic attacks” in to Google, we can see that there are 65,100 sites who can be found with this key phrase.

Now, ideally the nearer this number is to 0 the easier it is to rank on the search engines for this key term.  However, considering how many websites there are on the internet 65,100 is not such a hard target to rank in the first few pages of the search engines.  I wouldn't go for keywords that have over 75,000 competing websites.

So you need to identify keywords that relate to your website, that a fair few people search for each month, but these keywords should not have too much competition.  These keywords could be problems that your website solves – e.g how to get rid of love handles.

In the next chapter, we will be discussing how to insert these keywords into your site structure and web copy.  This will make the search engines pick up your site a lot faster and include it in the results, when people type in your selected keywords.

Ideally, you should define your keywords before you build your site, as this means you won't have to do much rewriting later.  It should be part of the planning stage.   This is an essential step, as if you don't target certain keywords, your competition will.